


It always leads me here (leads me to your door);

by maidenstar



Series: A Short Goodbye [FitzSimmons WW1 AU] [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, First World War, Historical AU, Injury, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, WWI AU, all warnings for mild war injury stuff, lame attempt at semi team fic with no team wow, wwi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 14:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2232003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maidenstar/pseuds/maidenstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The time, she soon found, passed by like winter mud; thick, heavy, and cold, filling up her boots as she tried to wade through each day, sinking deeper with every footstep.” WWI AU and sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1461154">'A Short Goodbye'</a>. As the day dawns for Fitz to arrive home on leave, Simmons is instead delivered a letter telling her that her best friend has been killed in action. Devastated but determined not to be beaten, she joins numerous other women in becoming a volunteer nurse, a decision that heralds the chance at a new life; adventure, new friendships, fresh horizons, and, at the end of the war, a shocking discovery about what really happened to her best friend…<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: A Short Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the second round of the Agents of SHIELD Big Bang event on [livejournal](http://aos-bigbang.livejournal.com/) and [tumblr](http://aos-bigbang.tumblr.com/)
> 
> This piece has come about as a sequel to a fic of mine that started out as [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1461154) oneshot, which isn't essential reading, but at only a few thousand words, it sets the scene and is perhaps worth a glance over, for clarity. 
> 
> The amazing fanart for this fic (which can be found below) is the work of the lovely [caputell](http://caputell.tumblr.com/) on tumblr right [here](http://caputell.tumblr.com/post/96246065253/agents-of-shield-big-bang-art-for-the-fic-it). Go tell her how amazing her work is!!! 
> 
> Warnings: As this is a war fic expect descriptions of battle and war injuries
> 
> All other important things can be found at the end of this fic, I think. Thanks in advance for reading and please do leave feedback, it's part of what helps us fic writers develop our skills!

 

**Prologue: A Short Goodbye**

_4 th June, 1918_

_Shepherds Bush, London_

 

Her parents did not ask. They did not have to. The letter fell from her hands and fluttered onto the kitchen rug like an autumn leaf as she sank blindly into the chair her father quickly vacated for her.                                          

Tears swam in her eyes and although she kept them from falling to her cheeks, they obscured her vision and she felt as though she were staring up at the world from the bottom of a lake. Her ears were ringing and somewhere beneath the ocean in her eyes she saw her father bend to pick up the letter. He paused for a moment to read its contents and murmured, for the benefit of her mother,

“Killed In Action.”

With a swish of cotton her mother stood and walked around the kitchen table, coming to crouch in front of her daughter. Her touch was gentle and warm as she softly placed a palm on either of Jemma’s knees, fingers moving slightly over the light linen of her summer skirt.

“Jemma,” her mother whispered, trying to break through the haze of emotion that floated around her. “Jemma. I know that the letter said he was killed in action but it might not mean – ”

“Of course it does _,_ ” Jemma interrupted harshly before her mother could finish, tears and fire in her voice in equal measure. She didn’t know whether she was devastated or angry, whether she should sob or scream. She thought perhaps, that once she had a moment alone, she would do both to test which felt more apt. Perhaps she’d do both a thousand times over.

She heard her mother make a noise that sounded as though she were about to continue talking, but, evidently, the words did not come. She finally blinked away her tears and saw that her mother had her lips pressed tightly together as she always did when she thought hard about something. She watched as her mother glanced over her shoulder at where her father was standing and, for a brief moment, her parents exchanged a series of looks. Her father looked stunned and slightly helpless, and grew ever more startled as her mother’s silent stare grew steelier (both he and Jemma understood that it was a message: ‘ _say something, tell her something comforting for goodness sake, don’t just_ stand _there’_ ). If the situation weren’t so terrible she might have laughed at the way her father looked as though he might wither away where he stood.

She appreciated his silence, however, and she knew that he perhaps understood her better than her mother. He had known that, because there was nothing anyone could say to make this any better, she would prefer the silence he offered. She half-smiled gratefully as he passed her by and placed a firm, bracing hand on her shoulder, before pulling his coat and hat from the stand by the door.

“I’m going to go to the factory and tell them you’ve had a bereavement. They can manage a few days without you,” he told her softly, but in a tone that suggested there’d be no arguing over the matter, even as she opened her mouth   to say that she’d rather keep busy.  He had left the house before she even had time to form the words, however.

She and her mother sat in silence before, eventually, her mother moved to the stove to heat some water.

“I’ll make up a pot of tea,” she said quietly, more to herself than to Jemma. “Sweet tea’s what you need after something like this.”

Jemma personally felt that there was nothing she wanted less than to drink tea, but didn’t have the fight within her to tell her mother otherwise. As her mother placed the kettle on the stove, Jemma did her best to think of anything but blood and battle, but instead (as a result, perhaps) found herself imagining, slowly, and in far too much detail, a hundred different ways a man might die  at war. With every shuddering breath she drew, each scenario became more grisly than the last and she could not stop herself from wondering which of these moments might have been her best friend’s last.  

When her mother eventually set the tea down in front of her, she drank it without thinking, and couldn’t care less that it scalded her mouth and burnt her throat as it settled, hot and uncomfortable, in her stomach.

“Jemma,” her mother whispered, concern furrowing her brow as she set her cup down too forcefully, her hand trembling. “Sweetheart…”

But Jemma was blind to her worry as she rose, quickly slipping on her shoes.

“Where are you going?” her mother asked, tone fretful.  

“Mrs. Fitz needs to know. I don’t want her to hear from anyone else.” The door clattered shut behind her, and it was only once she was alone, as she walked slowly down the street, that she finally let the tears slide down her face and the sobs force themselves out of her mouth. 


	2. 1. The Wild and Windy Night

_28 th May, 1918  
Soissons, France_

His fingers were numb and more than once he almost lost his grip on his rifle as he ploughed forward through the mud and the dirt.  

 _I don’t want to be here. I_ really _don’t want to be here. I just want to go home. Please, just let me go home._

He could not seem to stop the words playing over and over in his mind as the familiar weight of dread and panic set in, as it did with every battle he plunged into, headfirst with just a meagre tin helmet and heavy army jacket to keep him safe. With the high whiz of gunshots skirting right past his ear, the echoes of the cannons, and the screams of the injured and dying, it was difficult not to let terror take hold.

As he shifted his way through the trenches, only half-ready to go over the top again, he felt a tug at his neck, and heard a tiny _thmp_ below him. Looking down, he saw that the chain of his identification tag, already weak and damaged, had snagged on something sticking out of the trench wall. The chain had snapped and the little disc was now lying, broken, by his boots. Bending down, he hastily scooped it up and stuffed it into his inside pocket as he trudged on, keen to avoid the heavy tap of a pistol butt on his back from one of the officers, urging him to hurry.

The rush and pain of the battle was bad, but this waiting was worse. He reached his station and swallowed heavily at the sight of the ladder he would have to climb to make it out over the top. It was here that the real fear set in, that the churning of stomachs (already heavy with the weight of hunger, and sick with the slosh of watery soup) increased tenfold. He acted as he had been taught – channel nervous energy somehow, into something positive if possible. But be outwardly calm and serene, of course, when a superior appeared. And always look brave. If you look brave you might feel just a little braver.

This was all, perhaps, the first few pieces of advice he received when he went off to war, handed over sagely by the man he met on train out of London. He and First Lieutenant Grant Ward still crossed paths occasionally, and the American soldier always seemed to greet him like an old friend, though they barely knew each other. Ward was one of the modest number of men drafted over from the U.S. to help the Entente win the war, and was already an experienced soldier, that much Fitz had been able to tell the moment he saw him. Fitz had memorised every piece of wisdom Lieutenant Ward had offered him, and jaw set and determined as he shifted purposefully from foot to foot, he ran through it all again as he waited.

By now, he had learnt a lot about being a soldier – far more, in fact, than he had ever wished to know. One skill he had mastered quickly was the ability to aim a rifle as he fired, but to also see through whatever, or whoever, he shot. A part of him felt that this was a necessity to survive out here, the rest of him thought it was no more than simple cowardice; he didn’t even have the guts to look at the faces of the men he shot and killed. He had also learnt to mark battles and stints at the Front as stepping stones and landmarks along the path to his first week of leave, or until the end of the war, whichever came sooner.  Although he had begun keeping a tally when he only had ten more postings on the Front Line left to serve, he had really been counting down the days until he could go home since he had turned his back on Jemma at King’s Cross a year ago.

A few more nights until he was home and dry. Literally.  

Besides, this countdown was just another way of getting through each day. Everyone had their ways of coping.

One of his companions, a dark-haired man called Henry Daniels told them one night as they crouched together in the chill of the trenches, that he spent his time in No Man’s Land thinking of the most creative and offensive curses he could muster. He swore loudly each and every time a shot whizzed by, or the blade of a German toothpick (trench slang, Fitz had quickly learnt, for bayonet) came a little too close. He found increasingly cruder terms to refer not just to enemy soldiers, but also to the British generals and politicians who had commanded he fight, while, in his eyes, they did nothing but watch on from the side-lines. To hear Daniels tell it, his whole dash into enemy trenches was accompanied by an almost constant mental and verbal litany of the most inappropriate language imaginable. At first, Fitz had both laughed and cringed to hear the words the man from Tyneside muttered to himself, but he soon found that Daniels’s colourful vocabulary became a regular part of daily life, an almost comfortably routine one, and he barely bat an eyelid anymore. Anyway, there were bigger things to worry about than a few choice curse words.

Things were different for Joseph McLachlan, a fellow Scot. For Joe, there was no greater pleasure when at the Front than reminiscing about his farmhouse and sheep herds left behind in the Highlands. For a time, the older man’s talk of sweeping hills and green valleys, as well as his wife and three tiny children, had done nothing but make Fitz miss home even more. Sometimes the home he missed was Glasgow, his birthplace, while at others, it was the laboratory he often shared with Jemma, the one that had left a lump in his throat when it had been closed down after war was announced. However, a few weeks in, Fitz found himself more compelled than upset by McLachlan’s stories, and he quickly found that he was always Joe’s chosen audience, perhaps because of the close attention he paid. Daniels said he couldn’t take more talk of home when he was in some ‘mud-filled hellhole’ and Dyer and Carter, old school friends from Buckinghamshire, found their time better spent recalling past stories of girls they’d known and adventures they’d shared, and planning future exploits of both kinds for when the war was over.

Feeling perhaps a little inadequate one night after hearing some of Dyer and Carter’s taller tales about past girlfriends, Fitz had quietly asked McLachlan if he had had similar experiences growing up.

Joe had smiled knowingly, a gentle incline of one side of his mouth, before shaking his head.

“No, not a chance, son. I knew my Jessica growing up as a kid. Don’t think I ever saw myself spending my life with anyone else. Turns out she felt the same. Nothing wrong with fooling around like those two have done, s’long as no one gets hurt, but nothing wrong with loving just the one person either,” he had said, shrugging.

Fitz had missed Jemma a little more and a little less that night. For Fitz, his primary way of coping had always been to think of her. Perhaps it was clichéd, or perhaps it wasn’t, but it didn’t really matter to him. Memories of Jemma and her family (who had always treated him as a second son), as well as his mother, were what got him through each day and, according to Joe, that was all that mattered.

“You alright son?” McLachlan asked beside him now, catching him lost in thought.

He nodded mutely, not trusting himself to open his mouth during the long waves of nausea that swept through him. It was only a few moments more before the cry to charge went up, and he found himself shunted forward, dragging himself up out of the trenches and into the melee.

It always seemed as though he saw battle through the lens of a kaleidoscope. Just as the tiny patterns manifested at the end of a dark tunnel, the sheer din of shooting, shelling, and screaming made everything around him seem hazy – it was distant and dim. Otherworldly. Only certain things broke through the fog; fractals of light, a mosaic pieced together from the flash of shots from rifles, the shimmer of German helmets, the red rust of blood staining everything.

It was magnificent. In an awful, harrowing kind of way.

His legs felt soft and weak as silk as he moved forward, but perhaps there was a puppeteer moving his strings, because today he seemed to move and shoot of his own accord. But even as he moved forward he saw, as if the world had slowed to half its normal speed, the huge silhouette of an enemy shell as it landed with an earth-shaking crash in the ground ahead of him. It was too far away to blow him apart, or to injure him with the force of its impact alone, but with a high-pitched whizz, shards of deadly shrapnel were flung out in all directions, threatening to slice through him.

In those moments when he stared death in the face, he had found that although survival instinct always kicked in eventually, there was a tiny, secret corner of his mind that begged him to simply stand still and accept his fate. It was in those moments that he thought again of home, of Jemma and his mother, and it was enough to keep him safe. Until the next time.

His instinctual dive behind a large mound of upturned earth and rocks left him, to his horror, lying half across something large and solid, something cold and lifeless and all too much like a dead body.

Recoiling quickly, it took him a long moment to realise that this was not a corpse, brought to the surface thanks to the upturned, churned soil as he had first thought, but an injured soldier, alive for now but not, Fitz suspected, for much longer.

Like Fitz, this man was a patchwork of purplish bruises, a tapestry of criss-crossed cuts and scrapes and grazes, but Fitz’s eyes quickly picked out the injury that was causing the unknown man real difficulty; a large piece of shrapnel wedged into his stomach, blood oozing out of it.

His heart went out to the man, though he knew there was very little he could do to ease his suffering, and even less he could do to save his life. As Fitz took in the sight of him, caked from head to foot in a layer of thick, wet mud which shone eerily in the pale moonlight, he realised that he too would be covered in the stuff, and, glancing down, saw the front of his uniform was smeared and wet. Slowly, the smell of the mud drifted up to him, rancid and heavy it seemed to cling to the back of his throat and somehow stick in his nose. He always thought he might get used to it, and yet it always seemed to take him by surprise. This mud was not like the mud he had known at the allotments in which he worked before being called up to serve in the army. This mud was not the type that carried new life, but was full of death, saturated with blood, human waste, and the rotting flesh of the corpses trapped underground. This mud, this rancid concoction, had been churned over a hundred thousand times until it was liquid, thick and cold enough to drown a man if he got trapped in it. And it drowned many. A man submerged to his thighs _might_ be rescued but it took hours. Sometimes it was too dangerous, at others time simply ran out. Fitz still had nightmares of a man he had been forced to leave behind. His screams for help echoed in Fitz’s ears long after McLachlan had dragged him away.

No man wanted to die caked in this filth, but everyone was caked in it. It was impossible to shift. The soldier in front of Fitz cut an even more forlorn figure underneath the mud that clung to every part of him as he wordlessly reached out to Fitz.

“I’m Fitz, what’s your name?” he asked, taking hold of the man’s outstretched, trembling hand as it reached blindly towards him. Cold, bloody fingers slipped and fumbled against his own, and even when this unknown man gripped Fitz’s hand, the tremoring of his fingers did not subside. Indeed, his whole body was quaking, partly, Fitz assumed, from the severity of his injury, from pain and the fear of imminent death, but also because he seemed to be missing his jacket. Even as they approached the end of May, nights at the Front could still get uncomfortably cold.

As he went to speak, the man in front of him coughed suddenly, a wet, gravelly noise that caught deep in his throat, and Fitz wondered if he was about to choke on the mud even though he lay on the ground, unsubmerged. Fitz had seen that happen too. Mud clogging lungs, trachea, coming out of noses and mouths. This was not the fate of the soldier before him, who eventually managed to clear his throat enough to speak, although his voice was weak, sticky with the rust of death.

“English?” he asked with a strong accent. “Sprechen Sie jeden Deutsch?” he managed to choke out, barely audible over the raging storm of the battle.

At first, Fitz froze, almost withdrawing his hand. This man was the enemy. It took him a moment to shake the ideas that had been drilled into them all during their training, ideas about German soldiers, about their immorality and their depravity. He knew better than that. This man was a normal person, just as he was. This man was a son, and perhaps a brother, maybe a husband or a father.

Instead, he called to mind the day he’d first asked his mother, after his father did not return home from war, about death. She’d told him, in an effort to assuage his fears, that death was simply like the way it was before you were born. Peaceful and calm. And she’d said that all people came from that same place, and all would return there too. He had found it a calming thought at the time and perhaps even more so now. Though they had simply been words to comfort a grieving child, they had stuck. So, steeling himself, he looked back to the man, his pallid face alarmingly bright and stark against the dark brown of the soil around him, and the red of the blood soaked into his shirt.

“Ein bisschen.” He’d learnt a small amount of German during a research trip to Dusseldorf, part of his studies at UCL. So, he repeated his earlier statement, this time in German. “Ich bin Fitz. Was is Ihren Name?”

After a coughing fit and an attempt to moisten his lips, the man said, “Hans. Hans Müller.”

There was a pause which Fitz did not know how to fill, before Hans, his voice growing weaker by the second, choked out, “Fitz, ich habe Angst, und ich bin kalt. Können Sie…” he cleared his throat as his voice gradually faded away to nothing. “Konnen Sie mich helfen?”

The man was scared and cold, and he wanted Fitz’s help but really, what help could he offer? He wondered, briefly, what he’d want from a stranger in this situation and thought only of the soft fabric of a warm coat, and the firm touch of a friendly hand to hold. So, nodding slowly, he gently dropped Müller’s hand, gesturing to the panic stricken man that he simply wanted to remove his coat.

The chill of the night sliced through him as he removed the garment, helping the man to tuck it around his shoulders. He suppressed a shiver and watched as Müller gradually worked his arms into the sleeves, nodding and smiling gratefully and trying force a word of thanks out of frozen lips.

Fitz shook his head and simply crouched down, taking up Müller’s hand again. It was the least he could do, after all.

It didn’t take long for the familiar death rattle to clatter around Müller’s chest and, in the cold of the night, amongst the mud and the bullets Hans Müller drew his last, laboured breath. His grip on Fitz’s hand went slack, and the last of his shaking faded to nothing under Fitz’s watch. Fitz had wanted to look away, to shut it all out and pretend he never had to see another man die ever again. But he couldn’t let himself, couldn’t seem to turn away no matter how much he wanted to. Instead, he held Müller’s hand, whispered to him in the best German he could muster, and, when he went, gently drew the dead man’s eyelids shut, and murmured a quick prayer. Fitz had never been a particularly religious man and this war had only served to weaken what little faith he had, but he helped his mother to church every Sunday and knew enough prayers to say one to the man beneath him who wore a cross around his neck.

When he eventually moved off, back to the fighting (half worried he would be suspected of avoiding battle, of being a coward) it was with Hans Müller’s ghost at his side, keeping pace and hanging too close at his heels as Fitz wondered about his wife, about his mother, his children, all back in Germany waiting for him to come home, not yet knowing that he would never return to them. Fitz wondered how old Müller was, what job he had done before the war, what his dreams and aspirations were and as he considered these questions, it seemed the image of Müller’s dead body bore itself further behind his retinas. He would later think that it was this apparition that kept him from checking his surroundings thoroughly enough as he darted back into open land, suddenly exposed and vulnerable again.

The enemy shell that landed too close fell to the ground with a force that knocked his feet from under him and the air from his lungs. He was flung ten feet across the ground and felt a sharp pain, cold as ice but somehow also hot as fire, shooting through his back and left leg, right before the rock on which he hit his head sent him plunging headlong into nothingness. 


	3. 2. Long And Winding

_29th June, 1918_   
_Shepherds Bush, London_

The time, she soon found, passed by like winter mud; thick, heavy, and cold, filling up her boots as she tried to wade through each day, sinking deeper with every footstep. Her mind was cloudy like the city smog and she felt as though her thoughts were choking her, memories of his laugh and his smile stuck at the back of her throat, acidic and stale. She could not, would not, believe that she would never see him again, refused to even acknowledge that he was gone. The army was not in the practice of sending home the fallen and as such there had been no body for her to grieve over, though she had been told they had recovered one, and with nothing to bury there had been little closure, little proof that her friend was not alive and well somewhere.

It occurred to her only a few days after her request to bring him home had been conclusively denied that he would instead have been buried, as so many soldiers were, in a mass grave in the middle of nowhere. The tears had burned so hot at the very idea that she thought they might scald her cheeks as they fell, and the image of him being flung, limp and lifeless, underground with countless other men caused a physical ache in her chest. She did not know why, but when she imagined him lying there (and she thought of little else in the time that followed the letter), she almost always thought first of his hair. It had always been so unruly, always falling forward while he studied, and she had been in the habit of smoothing it back whenever it became a nuisance. He would always shy away from her attentions, pretend unconvincingly that he disliked the way she fussed, but everyone knew he secretly delighted in it, and her hand itched at the thought that she could not sweep the mass of curls backwards one final time lest it fall, forever more, over closed eyes, tickling the pale, cold skin of his forehead.

She could not pinpoint why it was that thought that plagued her the most.

Telling his mother had been more painful than she could ever have anticipated. The words were salt, and it rubbed harshly in the jagged, raw wound she already carried, the one that had opened up with the pain of Fitz’s death. If it hurt her so much to lose him, Jemma could not imagine how Mrs. Fitz felt. She had lost her husband in the Boer, and now her son in France and, ailing as she was already, it had been a wonder the heartbreak hadn’t killed her there and then. But, as Fitz had demonstrated to her on countless occasions, the Fitz family were made of strong stuff, and in amongst the wracking sobs, the tears, and the questions of what she had done to deserve such pain, Mrs. Fitz had refused to let loss beat her, though she seemed, to Jemma’s eyes, to be getting weaker with each passing day. She did her best to visit her at least every other day, to make sure she was coping and to ensure she ate well. Hypocritically, Jemma herself had taken to skipping meals, having found that she had little appetite since she’d been informed of Fitz’s death.

As had become customary across the city (and no doubt the country), and at Mrs. Fitz’s behest, Jemma had constructed a small memorial – a shrine of sorts – at the end of the street, next to three others. All four were made in memory of soldiers from their street, all boys no older than twenty-one. It had been a strange sight at first, to see so many pass by the tiny collection of flowers, candles, and photographs and weep openly for people they’d never met, but as Jemma read the dedications left for the other three boys, boys she had hardly known, she thought she understood it all a little better. Sometimes, on her way back from the factory, as dusk descended and she ensured the candles at Fitz’s memorial were all snuffed out in preparation for the nightly blackout, she spoke to him, providing no one else was around. She knew it was stupid, but it helped somehow to think she was filling him in on the events of her day, as she would do if they were ever apart (in itself a very rare occurrence). It helped also to tell him, or to tell the silence around her, just how much she missed him. It was perhaps the only time she allowed herself the chance to think about the void he had left in her life. There were days when she felt as though a shadow was following her around, damp and cold and full of the memory of him.

In the weeks that followed the arrival of the letter, time dragging by as though each hour were suddenly ten times longer than normal, she veered from frustration to devastation to numb acceptance, perhaps multiple times a day. Like everyone who had lost someone to this war she had her good days and her bad days. The good were the ones when she could go a few hours without thinking about him, the bad were the times when she felt as though her back would break to carry the weight of his loss on her shoulders. There would be times when she woke with a vague feeling of acceptance, an understanding that her best friend was gone now, taken by copper and hellfire, lost in the sea of battle alongside any number of other faceless boys. This feeling, the one that let her believe that she might just be able to go on alone, could last a morning, could last a few days even, but it always went away. Anything could be a trigger for change, a trip past the park in which they sat together most days to eat lunch and talk, the smell of solder and motor oil. Whatever it was, something would eventually remind her of him, and it would be another kick to the stomach to remember that he would no longer be around to experience the things he once used to love.

Worst of all were perhaps the days when she awoke and forgot entirely about the whole thing, when the loss didn’t weigh her down quite so heavily, and she failed to realise that he was dead. It would take her an hour, a morning, a whole day to realise the truth, and it was like losing him all over again. Once, she had been half into her coat and heading out the door, unaware of her mistake until her father had asked where she was going. She had come close to replying that she wanted to call in on Fitz when she remembered that he would not be at home, would never be at home again. She had hastily rearranged her words from ‘I want to go and see Fitz’ to ‘I want to go and see Fitz’s mother’ but she suspected her father had understood all the same – very little ever escaped him. On another occasion, she had already addressed an envelope to him in preparation of writing him a letter before she had realised that there was little point in doing so.

It was in this way that her first weeks following the announcement of his death passed by, with little to interrupt the pattern, little to break through the fog of grief that descended around her in tandem with the strange, thick summer haze that hovered over the streets of London.

The first break in the pattern of grief and factory work came along with the postman one warm and misty morning a little over two weeks after the army letter that had changed everything. She’d received no post at all since then and it was fitting, perhaps, that her salvation came, as her devastation had, in a thick white envelope with the address of their little semidetached house on Uxbridge Road written boldly on the front. As she read through the letter within, it took her a long moment to process the words in front of her, laid out on the page in dark typewriter font. In fact, she was forced to read the document over three times before she remembered that, what felt like a lifetime ago, she had applied to join the both the WRNs and the VAD. Her part in the war effort had so far been restricted to standing at the factory assembly line, and while she’d initially been content to do her part for her country, she only grew more bitter with every gun she put together. She did not wish to build killing machines, wondered every day how many deaths she had personally caused by this stage of the war. Besides, fitting pieces of metal together did little to occupy her mind now. Before Fitz had been sent away, when, at seventeen, he was still too young to fight and had worked instead at the city allotment digging plots, tending the earth and growing vegetables, she hadn’t minded having the extra time to think. Some of her better ideas had come out of time spent at the factory, but when Fitz had gone off to fight all she seemed able to do was worry about him. She’d craved a distraction and any one that was also a good cause appealed greatly to her. She'd long fancied an opportunity to do some good, a chance to do her best to put some soldiers back together again rather than simply assembling the guns that might blow them to bits in the first place.

But that impulse to do good now seemed worlds away, and she’d forgotten all about the applications she’d filled out. Here, however, was a letter with a red cross and the words ‘Voluntary Aid Detachment’ proudly emblazoned at the top of a page which told her that she’d been accepted for training and dispatch to a field hospital at the earliest possible date. For a moment, she hesitated, tamping down an urge to screw the paper into a ball and toss it aside. The selfish, angry part of her thought instantly of Fitz. No one had been there to save her best friend, what good was any of this war anymore? She’d wanted no part of it since his death, had struggled even to force herself to go to the factory each morning, and it was hard even now to fight to bring the fair, logical Jemma Simmons she had always known to the surface. Just because Fitz was dead didn’t mean she should not try to help others. With a pang of guilt she remembered her elder brother, also fighting in the war. She had been meaning to write to him for days but had not been able to put pen to paper, to forge out anything of any worth to say to him. She thought too of her younger sisters. What kind of example would she be setting to them if she let the loss of her best friend turn her into a bitter, resentful shell of her former self? Deep down she knew that this was the chance she needed to move on. Or perhaps to begin to move on, since she doubted Fitz’s loss would ever really leave her.

Dinner later that night, after her announcement, was tense and the family ate together in a silence that was entirely uncustomary at the Simmons’ table. The only sounds came from the chink of metal against ceramic; an uneasy symphony weaving throughout the heavy hush that surrounded them. Jemma pretended not to notice her mother's stare, her hazel eyes flicking between the soup on her spoon and her eldest daughter, sat opposite her. It was only after Jemma had stirred her soup aimlessly for the sixteenth time without eating anything that her mother threw her own spoon down with an ugly clatter.

“Have you even stopped to consider how dangerous it’ll be, and how worried your father and I will feel?” she exclaimed, voice high and unsteady. It was a rare moment which saw Mrs. Simmons lose control, and all three of her daughters flinched slightly, all in unison. “And that’s not to mention how futile this whole thing is!”

“Helen…” her father began quietly but Jemma shook her head at him.

She calmly laid down her spoon, wiping her hands on a small towel although they were not dirty. “Yes, of course I’ve thought of the danger,” she replied quietly and slowly, weighing each word carefully, examining its size and its shape. “And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t apprehensive. But honestly, I don’t think it’s as perilous as you’re fearing it will be. And as for futility? I shouldn’t think there was anything less futile to do at this time, and I don’t really understand how you can say otherwise.”

“I spoke to Mrs. Stevenson this morning at the post office, and only last week your father bumped into Mr. Collins. Their boys came back from war broken, they told us. Both had lost limbs and they seemed shaky and edgy at the slightest thing.” Her mother shuddered slightly. “They both said their boys seemed to have lost that spark, that glint in their eye, saw no enjoyment in their old pursuits, no real point in going on after what they’d seen. Shells of their former selves, apparently.” At this last sentence Mrs. Simmons’s voice quavered dangerously and Jemma knew she was thinking of James, her only son and Jemma’s elder brother.

“He’ll be fine, mother,” Jemma murmured, “and so will I.”

“Jemma, whatever you’re thinking, whatever ideas you have about trying to do some good it won’t feel that way. Not when you get there. Seeing men blown to pieces, all cut up or missing li…” Mrs. Simmons shuddered, unable to say the words. “Seeing such horrible things, you’ll never recover. Better to stay here sweetheart. Please.”

Jemma paused, breathed in, counted to ten. She knew her mother meant well, knew she was fearful and just wanted to keep her daughter safe, but it irked her that her mother thought her so naïve. She had already considered all these things and more. She knew it wouldn’t be easy, she knew it wouldn’t feel good to see so many men suffering and afraid. She had never once thought she’d go voluntarily to a place where she would see so much death, and especially under such circumstances, but she’d made her decision, and there was little that would change her mind. She didn’t want to be a bad daughter, or a bad sister, but she knew deep down that no one in her family truly thought of her as either.

“I know it’s going to hell, mother. Probably worse, in fact,” she eventually replied, fighting to keep her voice level. “I know how awful it’s going to feel to be there, but I can’t just sit here. I can’t just stay here making more guns and thinking of Fitz and James as I do so. I can’t feel guilty like this anymore. Guilty that I’m making killing machines, guilty that I’m here doing nothing while James suffers, while Fitz is dead.” She lost her battle to stay calm, watched her mother’s expression grow slack and soft even as her tone grew harder.

Mrs. Simmons, perhaps having no real retort, or perhaps knowing how useless it would be to argue, returned to her food without commenting further. Dinner continued on in stony silence, though Jemma barely touched any more of her soup, and the rest of the evening was devoid of the household’s normal chatter and laughter. The mood hardly lifted as Jemma made all the necessary preparations to leave and begin her training in the days that followed, and, as she snuffed out the oil lamp in the room she shared with her sisters one evening a week later, Jemma turned to find two pairs of eyes watching her earnestly from across the room.

“You two should be asleep,” she told the girls, but with no real weight to her tone.

“Are you really going to go?” the elder of the two asked, fear and awe in her voice in equal measure.

“Yes. Yes I should think so Han,” she told her gently. Hannah, at fifteen, was old enough now to have picked up on the horrors of the war. She’d been so young when it started, but she had grown up to the sound of air raids, with the worry for her absent brother stuck at the bottom of her stomach. She knew to fear for her older sister, packing up that night to fight a war of her own. Eleven year-old Ellie, on the other hand, was filled with more optimism and enthusiasm than her sister.

“You should Jem, you should go!” she whispered excitedly, shuffling around beneath the blankets.

“But it’s dangerous,” Hannah countered. “And mother is going to worry.”

Jemma crossed the tiny room and sat at the foot of her sisters’ bed, laying a gentle hand on Hannah’s arm. “Mother will always worry,” she pointed out softly. “But you two should not. The latest rumour is that the war will be over before this year comes to an end. I’ll be away for a few months at most.”

“But that’s what they said four years ago! They said the war would be over by Christmas. And it wasn’t,” Hannah argued, now propped up on her elbows to fully stare – or glare – at her sister. In truth, Jemma herself wasn’t sure how much she believed those predictions, and she had known they would not be enough to placate Hannah, who was more their mother than she or Ellie would ever be.

“Don’t listen to her!” Ellie interjected, dodging Hannah’s elbow with practiced ease. “You should go! You can help people, and you’ll be going to France!” She had sat up too now, eyes wide and shining. She always talked about visiting France, had always wanted to see the capital.

“I don’t think I’ll be seeing much of Paris,” Jemma laughed, fondly ruffling Ellie’s hair. Hannah had gone oddly quiet, lying back on her side and sniffling slightly. Jemma moved to crouch by the top of the bed, tickling the back of Hannah’s neck until she laughed and squirmed and Jemma could reach her cheek to kiss it.

“And Hannah, I swear I’ll be careful. You don’t have to worry about me, although I know you will,” she said with a smile.

“Promise you’ll be careful?” Hannah mumbled, voice still thick with tears.

“Promise.”

Still, this did not stop either sister, or her mother, crying openly when they bid Jemma goodbye at the crack of dawn the next morning, and she’d have been lying if she said her heart wasn’t beating a little faster as she boarded a bus to the other side of the city, bag firmly in hand. It had scarcely calmed down as she made her way to the training centre for the VAD, a small hospital on the outskirts of London. The letter she’d received told her that she’d be given a week’s training before heading to France.

The real fear, though, took a while to settle into her bones and it took a day or two for the real gravity of her decision to hit her. At first, she had little time to consider it, her first day at the hospital was too full with introductions and tours, with being fitted for uniforms and shown to her bed in a shared dorm with four other girls. As scared as she soon found herself, however, she was at least quietly assured that her study of biology would stand her in good stead and, as her week of training progressed, she wasn’t disappointed. The sisters at the hospital were interested in the knowledge and experience she had gained at university; it was almost unheard of for a woman to gain such a high level of education, after all. She herself had never expected to get there.

When Fitz had received full scholarship funding for a place at UCL, she’d been refused a similar opportunity mostly, she assumed, on the grounds of her gender. From the day she and Fitz had met as children, they’d both known they were as clever as each other, and much cleverer than most of their peers. There was little to separate them except for their gender, and as such Jemma had known instantly what had kept her out of university. It had stung to bid goodbye to Fitz on his first morning there, but as sorry as she had been for herself, she was genuinely happy for him. It wasn’t until, a few weeks later, she wrote to Professor Anne Weaver, the only female member of staff in the faculty, expressing her interest in her work and her sorrow that she would not be able to study under her, laying out her primary interests and ideas, that she had been informed that her application had been reconsidered. Suddenly, she had a full scholarship and two weeks’ worth of work to catch up on and her first term at UCL rushed by in a whirlwind of hard work and elation. Years later, she still had no idea what strings Professor Weaver had pulled to make Jemma her student, but she remained unspeakably grateful, especially now that her knowledge of human anatomy, of bodily function, and of medicine and drugs was being put to a use she had never before envisioned.

She felt for the other girls who were new to all of this – a week was not long enough to gain sufficient medical knowledge and confidence. She tried to help where she could, but her superior knowledge won her no friends. Even if no one was especially unkind to her, three of the other girls made no effort to get to know her, and one always seemed to keep completely to herself. This was not new to her though, for as long as she could remember Fitz had been her only friend – the only one she’d ever wanted. And now, even after the shortest week of her nineteen years, she had noticed his ghost seemed to play less insistent at her shoulder. She did not want to forget him – had no intention of doing so – but she could not allow the spectre of his loss to haunt her and, as she had predicted, being always busy and tired was finally helping her grieve as she wished, on her own terms.

And she found too that she must have impressed others (as she always did) because when her seven days training were up, the matron she had trained under took her and one other girl – a stout, smiley woman by the name of Rose – aside to praise them for their hard work, and to tell them that they’d written ahead and given the sister at their posting special references. They’d likely be given greater responsibilities earlier on, with the matron assured that she and Rose ‘could be trusted to do their division of the VAD proud’.

In fact, Jemma still had those words ringing in her ears as she began her journey to France later that night, and she felt a little glow of pride mingle with the thrill of fear she felt at what was to come.


	4. 3. The Rain Hath Washed Away

_4 th June, 1918  
Soissons, France_

He’d misplaced his boots. Or perhaps someone had taken them while he slept. Nothing, he had found, was sacrosanct here in the trenches (and especially not in the hospitals where men lay unconscious or dying); food rations, clothes, and shoes all had a strange habit of going missing. While most men had every respect for their friends and comrades, _all_ men wanted to survive and make it home, and a full belly and strong sturdy boots were just some of the things which helped keep you alive a bit longer. But Fitz had never really thought too much about it all until now; now, it was _his_ belongings that were gone, it was his boots that had disappeared and he really, really needed to find them. He suddenly felt very sick, panicking at this sudden turn of events,  as he started to inch his way around the labyrinth of trenches, hollow dugouts all connected like a rat’s lair. Passing soldiers didn’t seem to notice him as he searched, and no one stopped to help him. Mud from the trench floor started seeping through the threadbare patches in his socks and stuck, slick and cold, between his toes.

In spite of his frantic efforts, time was not on his side, and he had not found the missing boots when a passing officer approached him, demanding to know why he hadn’t joined his comrades in preparation for the charge into No Man’s Land. His attempts to explain that someone had taken his boots meant nothing to the other man, who roughly pushed a rifle into his hands and all but dragged him, still bare-footed, to the back of a group of soldiers preparing to go over the top.

Though he tried many times, disorientated and scared, to explain his situation or to find some appropriate shoes nearby, he was eventually forced to proceed in just his threadbare socks. As he climbed to the top of the trench, he wished bitterly that he had found the time to darn them, not that the extra fabric would have protected his feet much better. Indeed, he had made little progress across No Man’s Land when the pain in his feet became too much to bear. He had never thought he’d wish for his legs to be numbed by the icy cold winters at the Front, but it would have been preferable to crossing No Man’s Land – a sea of upturned rocks and stones, barbed wire, and chunks of glass and metal – without his boots. Just as he stumbled and felt something incredibly shark stick into the sole of his left foot, sending an unimaginable dart of pain from there to the top of his leg, a German shell appeared right above him, seemingly out of nowhere. With a garbled roar as loud and fearsome as thunder, it flew closer and closer at a sickening speed, and he cowered, petrified and awestruck in its magnificent shadow.

Just as the shell was about to hit him, he woke suddenly, a strangled cry of fear and pain hot on his lips and his vision tinted with the red haze of pain. He was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and thought that he had perhaps shouted something about his boots, but found himself in too much pain to care. A strange pressure on his foot subsided slightly, and slowly his surroundings came to him. He was lying on a hard, uncomfortable bed, with the familiar canvas ceiling of a hospital tent above him, rippling slightly in the breeze. He’d visited a number of the godforsaken places many times before to check in on injured friends, but he’d had the good fortune to avoid being a long-term patient in one before now.

His first thought was to his injuries, whatever they were. He couldn’t tell exactly what had happened to him, but every inch of his body hurt. Craning his neck slightly to look down at his body, he was relieved to count two legs, and two arms, as well as two hands with five intact fingers on each. He could no longer recall the number of men he’d seen lose limbs, especially legs, and he felt at least slightly relieved that he seemed to have all body parts still attached and, seemingly, in one piece. Just how well they all worked, however, was another question entirely. While his right arm seemed painless and uninjured, his left was bandaged up tightly and protested fervently at his attempts to move it.

“You need to keep still,” a voice told him softly from somewhere near his feet.

Though somehow he had missed her a moment ago, at a second glance he noticed a nurse standing at the end of his bed. She seemed to be attending to a dressing on his left leg, and he thought perhaps he understood his dream a little better as another stab of pain flared up beneath her fingers. He flinched and she gave out a sympathetic hum, stilling her movements for a moment.

“Good to see you back with us, Private,” she told him with a grim smile that failed to reach her eyes, but she did not sound insincere. Her voice was soft and strangely calming and it was a moment or two before he realised that she had an American accent.

“How long have I…” he began, but found his throat sore and his mind sluggish and cloudy.

The nurse understood him well enough. “Four days.”

He slumped back the few inches he’d risen from his pillow, his whole body weak and shaky and not at all equipped for holding him up, even for a short period of time. As he lay there for a moment, he grew increasingly sure that something was amiss, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. It hurt his head to concentrate on anything at all for too long, so, instead, he tried to clear his throat once more.

“I’m going to have someone fetch you some water,” the nurse told him gently as he coughed. She resumed her task of removing dressings from his left leg and began to speak to him as she worked, explaining what she was doing and why she was doing it. Perhaps she did so out of habit or duty, or possibly she was perceptive enough to know that he had been trying to ask about his injuries, but he couldn’t find the energy to care. 

“You’ve broken your left arm in two places, but they were clean breaks, easy enough to set. It should heal up nicely providing you rest it well enough. We’re more worried about your leg, and a nasty cut on your head. The bone in your thigh was completely shattered, and your knee was dislocated. The surgeon managed to operate to save the limb, but I have to tell you that you’re not out of the woods yet. If infection sets in, we may still be forced to amputate it. And even if we don’t you still might not gain full use of the leg back.” Her tone was grave but completely devoid of any pity, and, although his heart lurched at the idea of losing his leg, he found he appreciated her candour.

“And my head?” he asked, voice growing slightly stronger.

“Yes,” she went on thoughtfully. “We’re not sure exactly what happened there but you must have taken quite a blow. We can’t say yet if or how that’s affected you, but we’re going to keep an eye on it. You’re in good hands, Private,” she assured him and he didn’t doubt her for a moment.

After a moment’s pause and a word of warning, the nurse began winding clean bandages over his leg, an experience about which the word ‘agony’ could do little justice. His knee was still tender and he could tell it was swollen as she tended to it, but it was his thigh that burned at the slightest pressure, a painful combination of the inner ache of his shattered bone and the sharp stinging of countless grazes and cuts to the skin, alongside the incisions made by the surgeons. He tried his best to keep from crying out, bit down so hard on his lip he drew blood, but once again it seemed that he was fighting a losing battle.

The only relief came from the fact that the nurse worked impossibly quickly, and he could only wonder how often she must have tended to injuries such as is. Her movements were deft and well-practiced and he realised with a strange twist of his stomach that she had seen as much death and destruction as he had. Perhaps more. As she moved round the bed to check on his arm, she cast an appraising look over his face, and he found himself watching her back with equal interest. Her dark ponytail swayed gently with every move she made and her face was soft, giving away little indication of her age. It was her eyes, though, that intrigued him the most. They were dark, and carried a steel to them, and as they reflected the orange lantern light they spoke somehow of fire and flint, suggesting that she was not a woman to be trifled with. But there was something beneath the flames, beneath the spitting amber sparks, a strange sadness that he could not explain. He felt as though her eyes were full of ghosts. The sadness there seemed to pass right from her own soul into his, filling him up with a melancholy that frightened him. The hurt and pain deep in her eyes was enough to make him look away, but the feeling of gloom remained within him.

She’d fallen silent as he watched her, but when he looked away she spoke again.

“You didn’t have an identification tag on you when you were brought in,” she told him, half a chastisement in her tone, as though he should have taken better care of his belongings as he stood in the middle of No Man’s Land. “We’ll need your details so we can fill in your forms and find your logbook. Your division has moved onwards now, and a new one has been posted here, but we can have your books and papers sent to us.” She paused, moving to tend to the bandages on his head. “And I can’t keep calling you Private. So, what’s your real name, Private?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. He repeated the action once, twice more. And then he was hit with the heart-stopping realisation that he couldn’t answer her question.

_He couldn’t remember his name._

“Uh,” his mind felt sluggish and he was hit with the sudden desire to cry. Every word he tried to speak was slow to come to him. He had never been slow before, that much he knew. He thought so hard he felt as though his skull might crack in two, and the more he tried to remember the simple piece of information the more distant the answer felt. “My name’s…”

The letter ‘F’ burnt bright on the fringes of his mind but nothing else came to him.

The nurse nodded gently at he struggled and explained that memory loss like this often came with blows to the head, and also with traumatic experiences, and he seemed to have experienced both in one go.

“But is it…will I…will I get my memories back?” he asked, frantic, his heart now racing in his chest and the blood rushing round his ears.

“I’m afraid I can’t say. But you must try to stay calm, however impossible that sounds right now. You need to rest. You’ll be out of the war for a long while yet with that leg, if not sent home permanently, so there’s plenty of time to recover what’s lost,” she told him, her hand on his shoulder for the briefest of seconds. That, of course, was completely useless since he had no idea who he was, no memory of an address or next of kin name. The nurse knew this too, he could tell by her expression, and her tone carried little optimism. He wondered how many times she’d seen this before, wondered if she was already calculating how unlikely it was that he would ever regain any of his memories. “In the morning, I’ll call the doctor round to see if there’s anything he can recommend. For now, let’s see what you can and can’t remember.”

Although the last battle, the one which had seen him injured, was almost entirely lost to him, some details of his time at war still remained. He found he could remember the faces of the men he had fought with but their names, like his own, were hazy. The nurse tried to prompt him. Did he remember his age? Perhaps his date of birth?

He felt the number nineteen was appropriate but couldn’t tell whether it was his age or part of his birth date. Perhaps it was both, or maybe neither.

“Age, most likely. I’ll put your birth date down as 1899 when I get a chance to fill in some papers later,” she decided eventually after casting her eyes over his face again. He realised now that their lack of information about him must have been the cause of her staring at him earlier. As they spoke, he refused to acknowledge, even to himself, that he was having trouble calling to mind some of the details of his own face.

The nurse moved on with her questioning. Could he remember his hometown? Perhaps a few details about his family? He strained and struggled, panicked and nearly lost his battle to hold back the tears in his eyes, but his mind would not give up the information. Upon realising that he could scarcely remember his own mother’s face he had turned away from the nurse for a moment, and when he looked back a little while later, cheeks slightly damp, he found her staring at the bottom right corner of his bed. He was more grateful than he could say.

She prompted him to tell her anything he could about his past life, explaining that they would work to find out more about his identity, but with everyone he had known from his division gone, his lack of identification or next of kin contact papers, and his own sudden memory loss, there was little to go on. He told her about his mind drifting to the letter ‘F’ when he thought about his name and she nodded, encouraging him to continue.

“And I keep thinking about London,” he stammered eventually, after a long period of thought. “I think I lived in London. I can remember a classroom, science lessons. Physics, maybe.” He was clever, he knew that much.

Except, he supposed, he wasn’t at all clever now. He couldn’t remember a thing about the classes he’d taken, wouldn’t even know the first thing about science.

She let him think for a few moments longer before encouraging him to rest, although she had one final question before she went off to find someone to bring him some water. “And, ‘F’ is still the only letter you can think of when it comes to your name? Nothing else is coming to mind?”

“No. I…don’t think so. Sorry.”

She nodded gravely and, as she prepared to leave, told him to call for a nurse if there was anything he needed in the night. She had already left his side and started off down the rows of beds as he changed his mind.

“Wait! I think…maybe ‘J’? Yes, there’s definitely something about the letter ‘J’.”

***

Empty, hollow days seeped seamlessly into dark, lonely nights. If he spoke, it was only ever to a nurse or to a doctor. No one visited him. Who was there now that the people he’d known had gone away? The hospital tent was surprisingly empty for a while after he woke up. The men there had all either been discharged to move forward with his old division, or, being deemed too sick to continue fighting, had been sent home or to better-equipped hospitals away from the Front. He had been unconscious at the time though, and the doctors hadn’t thought him well enough to be moved.

At any rate, the nurse he had met upon waking, who he eventually learnt to call SisterMay, had told him sadly a few days after he had regained consciousness that the battle had been a bad one for both sides. Though there had been an eventual victory for the Entente, both sides had suffered heavy losses and there were very few casualties from the four allies even sent back to the hospital. She was sorry, she said and she truly sounded it as she grimly told him that his friends were most likely dead. In fact, the hesitation in her voice made him think that she hadn’t really wanted to tell him this information at all. It had taken days of him asking after the men in his division, even risking the tempter he could sense bubbling away under the surface (even if he’d not yet, thankfully, had to see it emerge fully). His pestering had worked though, and she seemed to respect his persistence.

He looked forward to Sister May’s visits more than the other nurses, but still found himself bereft without company and with so few of his memories intact. Though, daily, a little more of what he had lost returned to him, it was often of little use; he dreamt one night of a bookcase, saw all of his favourite titles on the shelves in what he assumed was his room at home, while eating lunch one day he tasted and then recalled a few of his favourite foods and he woke up one morning absolutely certain that he had liked gardening. But outside of the little thrill at each individual triumph he found himself frustrated at his slow progress. As time went on, he started to feel like the seashore, knew now how it felt to have the tide cover everything, washing over the shoreline and, upon drawing back, leaving the sand flat and blank, no sign that anyone had ever even touched it. What did he care about what books he’d once read or that at one time he had grown carnations in an allotment somewhere? It didn’t help him remember his name or anything about his identity. He didn’t know if he had a family, or if he had friends or a wife or girlfriend back at home. He had no greater understanding of who he was when remembered trite facts about food or books.

“Of course you do,” May had insisted quietly when he told her this one evening as she brought his medication over from the pharmacy. “What you like to eat, your favourite books, your hobbies, that’s all part of who you are! That’s what really matters, far more than a name or a date of birth.”

She’d left him with that thought and, after mulling it over, he slept much better that one night than he had in the entire week previously.

Still, it grated on him to just lay there, day in, day out with only the pain in his leg for company. His days were all consumed by fire; flames of intense pain drifting across his leg with little respite. Even after a week, when his head had largely stopped throbbing, and his arm only bothered him if he moved too much, it seemed as though his damned left leg had not healed at all. Only at night time, with the aid of painkillers, did the inferno shrink slightly, dimming down like the flames in a lantern when the fluid ran dry, but still, falling sleep was a challenge, slumber often evading him for nights at a time. Those restless nights became a sleepless haze, and as days turned into weeks, he often found himself sleep-deprived, irritable, and snappy. 

Too often, to his own great shame, this found an outlet on the nurses. In general, they took the greatest care with his examinations, his dressings, and his therapy, but his leg hurt most of all under the touch of another, and he could seldom help but cry out, or let harsh words spill between lips made slack with agony, his temper flaring up as hot as the pain itself. Sister May had scolded him once for it, but it was needless – once the pain was over, no one felt worse than he did, often ashamed of his behaviour and keen to apologise. The problem rested with _him_ , he was aware of that much, but had no recollection of whether this temper had always been a part of him or if, as his gut was telling him, it was yet another aftereffect of this war, and of his injuries. The Sister had mentioned too that the other nurses’ – and her own – movements were just so to ensure that his bone would heal as well as they could possibly hope, and to try to ensure that he did not develop and infection. If he did, the pain would only increase, she’d told him, but for now, he was lucky.

In fact, the term ‘lucky’ was one he had come to hear a lot. He remembered vividly, the first time the bed next to his was occupied. It had been empty when he first woke, many of the beds in his ward had been, and even as he woke, his mind hazy and his memory gone, he had not needed to ask about the bed’s former occupant. In fact, the empty bed had been a strange presence beside him, reminding him that a man had died a few feet away from where he lay, probably as he had slept, as he had been dreaming fitfully of missing boots and German shells. At first he had wished for nothing more than it to be occupied again. It had nothing at all to do with wanting to see another man hurt, but perhaps a lot to do with seeing one heal. And also maybe about his wish to have a little company. His bed was nestled in the corner of the ward he found himself on, and was too far away from the next row of beds for him to effectively converse with the men around him, although the tent was hardly alive with chatter. Although some had visitors and others did speak with those around them, many of the men were often silent in their suffering, perhaps too well-accompanied by their own ghosts of war to want to speak to anyone else.

When he got his wish of a neighbour, however, he soon realised it to be a more of a curse than a blessing. The newcomer had lost his leg out on the battlefield itself, there had been no chance of the doctors performing any reparatory surgery on _him_ , and, understandably, the loss had hit him hard. Still, it did not make his vitriolic comments any easier. The soldier, who the nurses all called Taylor, scarcely wanted to talk, but when he did it was to berate others, especially his new neighbour. Taylor had seen the hopeless look he carried in his eyes at the mere thought of his damaged leg, and frequently told him that he should not be feeling so hopeless, did not deserve to. For Taylor, he was lucky just to have the leg intact in the first place. In a bid to hold his tongue against the remarks, he reminded himself constantly that Taylor was suffering, that they’d fought the same war, had shared the experience as allies and not enemies. But still, it angered him to hear Taylor call him ‘lucky’ at any given opportunity, the word delivered as if the other man were spitting out poison, his tone angry and bitter.

Even a cheerful-looking Welsh soldier, who had often waved gaily from across the ward, and who had paid a visit to his bedside once he had been discharged had said the same, albeit in a far more offhand, jovial manner.

“Lucky about the leg,” he’d muttered so as not to disturb Taylor, and looking down at the shattered limb. “Least you’ll be able to get around well enough once you get out here!” He’d said it as if moving around in constant pain were a good thing, but at the time he had let the comments slide. He was only happy to have half an hour of conversation before the Welshman made his leave.

He wondered, occasionally, if he truly _was_ lucky, and was simply acting too ungratefully, but he did not feel lucky. In fact, he often had to hold in a sneer of derision at the thought that his situation was a fortunate one. He had not lost his life and he had not lost his limbs, but if this was the best that could be said for him then, to his mind, he might as well have lost both and been done with it.

After all, he had not left his bed once since he’d woken, was practically incapable of doing anything for himself, and there wasn’t a day that went by that his leg didn’t pain him so badly that he wished they’d just taken the thing in the first place and gotten it over with. And even in spite of his inactivity he was always tired and irritable these days because he could never sleep. He quickly found that there were demons behind his eyelids, and if the pain in his leg didn’t keep him up at night, then the monsters did. Every time he tried to close his eyes and fall asleep he heard screams, the last, hoarse shouts of dying men, and whenever the wind carried the faint sound of shelling or the smell of burning rubber throughout the ward, his whole body shook and he was forced to fight the desperate urge to dive under a bed, or table. Even if his broken body would not allow such movement, his broken mind wanted nothing more than to run for cover, the urge based more in muscle memory and instinct than in rational thought by now. And whether or not he could hear the sounds of battle, his hands seemed to shake almost constantly now, and even as his arm healed he feared that it might always be weak and close to useless.

He had mentioned all of this to May once, when she picked up on his prickly reaction to being called ‘a lucky one’. He’d told Sister May who, for a reason unbeknownst even to him, he seemed to trust more than the others, that he felt as though the war had cost him too much to ever think of himself as lucky. He wasn’t like Taylor or any of the amputees but he wasn’t in a much better state. The thought of war and battle now, even the little he could remember, gave him nightmares even when he was not asleep. When men were brought to the hospital, screaming, limbs missing, insides on the wrong side of the body, caked in thick, dark blood (one man had even lost half of his face to a flying piece of shrapnel) he had to fight the urge to vomit. Not at the sight of the injuries (though it was harrowing to say the least), but simply at the thought of war; even that had become too much to stomach. Except, he could barely remember the war, it burned him up inside to think he was one of the lucky ones, when he did not even know his name now.

He wouldn’t even know his own best friend if they walked right past him. Hell, he didn’t even know if he _had_ a best friend.

The war had cost him everything; his family, his friends, even himself. When the others received messages from home, he sat there alone, bitterly blinking away tears. He still couldn’t shake the tie he felt to science, to the idea that he had been a scientist of some sort once, but he struggled now to spell complicated words, and it had taken hours of practice (at May’s insistence) to even pick up the skill of writing legibly again. There was no call for a scientist like that, and the world surely had no need of a man who couldn’t walk, couldn’t remember his own name, and failed to keep his hands from tremoring at the slightest mention of war.

She’d nodded solemnly at that, thinking long and hard before she spoke.

“You’re right,” she’d told him quietly. “War takes something from everyone it touches, and we don’t always regain it. It’s natural to feel the way you do, to feel robbed by the war. Events like this, they change people. If you feel different, it’s because you _are_ different,” she’d agreed sadly, and he thought he saw something flicker in her eyes that spoke not just of sympathy but of a deep, close understanding. “But you _are_ here, you _are_ alive. You might think there’s no place for you now, as you are. But there’s always another cause, another road to take. Trust me, I know.”

She’d walked off at that, words hanging enigmatically – and chillingly – in the empty space she left behind.

*** 

His stay in Ward 1 of the field hospital had totalled over a month when one of the volunteer nurses came to him one morning to bring him news that he was to be transferred, allowing him to chew over and digest the idea with his breakfast. Not, of course, that he had much say in the matter, and whether he was happy or sad to be going, he had no idea. The young nurse had told him what he and everyone else already knew; that his service in the war was over – his grazes and cuts had all healed over, his arm was close to usable again, but his leg was not making good enough progress. It was time, so he was told, to be moved a recovery facility away from the Front, where they could make use of a new and rare x-ray machine to gauge how his bones were healing, and use techniques to bring repressed memories of his back to the fore. Not to mention that they would attempt to help him walk again. All the doctors had been waiting for, apparently, was transport to take him and a few other soldiers to the facility a good few miles away.

“We had word as dawn broke that we’re going to receive a delivery of supplies later today. They’ve got another delivery to make to a recovery facility in the south. They’re on a tight schedule though, and have to leave this evening,” the nurse told him and he was initially shocked at the idea of leaving so soon.

As the day wore on, however, passing by in the same dull, uneventful way the others had, he found he was not sad at the idea of a change of scenery.  Still, he would miss Sister May’s company and, as dusk descended, it was with a heavy heart that he said goodbye to her. Though other soldiers seemed to find her quiet and slightly too direct, unnerving in her honesty even, he had valued her candour and her calm nature above all else. She was the type of person you trusted at once, and she had a way of making him, and every other man in her care, feel as though they truly mattered to her.

As he told her just that, and thanked her for everything, she gave him a rare smile and wished him well, mentioning that she might even write to him if she could find the time.

“Perhaps one day I’ll even get a reply with a name signed at the bottom, Private,” she told him hopefully, and he nodded, unsure whether he felt optimistic about that.

As he left, carried on a stretcher out of the hospital tent into fresh air and open ground for the first time in months, everything was a hive of activity. Nurses rushed about, unloading supplies from a small group of large army vehicles with red crosses painted on the sides. He noticed that there were other, different vehicles also parking up a few feet away, and a pair women hopped awkwardly out of one and onto the grass below. May had accompanied him as he left, informing him that she was expecting new volunteers and she bid him one final goodbye as she made her way over to the women, looking less than assured by them all.  They looked nervous, he noted, though he hardly blamed them. One in particular caught his eye as he was carried across the field, she was pretty – exceptionally so – with bright hazel eyes and loose brown curls that she’d pinned up beneath her hat. He watched as she took in all the sights and sounds of the hospital, and he was glad that her head was turned slightly away from him so she did not seem him looking at her. He found himself strangely drawn to her, perhaps because of her kind face and gentle eyes, almost wished she had arrived before he had to leave. He thinks he sees her turn her head as he is carried onto a van, still craning his head to look at the woman, but to no avail.

Still, even without the last glance he so strangely craved (with no real explanation as to why), the image of the pretty girl with the curly hair and bright, intelligent eyes, stayed with him long after he fell asleep to the feel of the ground moving beneath him.


	5. 4.  Many Times I’ve Been Alone

_9 th July, 1918  
_ _Soissons, France_  

She felt as though her brain had been rattled round her skull non-stop for days on end, an assessment that wasn’t too far from the truth. Almost as soon as she and the other volunteer nurses had made port in Boulogne-sur-Mer, they’d been herded into the back of two rusting army trucks and Jemma had scarcely left the vehicle in the few days it took to get her station in the north of France, close to the Aisne. A warm, orange sunset had welcomed them to France as together the group of women found their way onto the pier, bags under their arms. All around them, the docks were even busier than she had expected to find them; uniformed soldiers hurried about in every direction, almost all walking with an obvious sense of purpose, though it was hard to tell how anyone could find their way through the throngs of people. Weaving in amongst the crowds, some men lead horses here and there, while others carried large chests, presumably full of supplies to be taken to the Front.

The group of five stood together off to one side, awaiting further instructions, and Jemma found herself watching the hustle and bustle with interest, playing guessing games about the people around her. When certain men passed her by, it was easy to tell they were being sent home on leave; they looked pale and tired, and their eyes were distant, their expressions haunted and hollow. Other men were more visibly injured, many were amputees, and she felt a shudder go through her at the thought of the job that awaited her. However, others were more difficult to place. Off to their left stood two portly Generals, smoking cigarettes and laughing uproariously, and Jemma could not tell if they were coming, going, or at the port for another reason entirely.

Most difficult was the moment one particular group of soldiers passed her by, and Jemma could tell by the looks on their faces that they were new recruits, recently landed in France and completely green out in the field of battle. She wasn’t sure precisely how she knew this, except that she fancied she could still see tiny glimmers of optimism mingled with the tentative, nervous expressions on their faces. This was the look Fitz had worn as she’d walked with him to the train on the day he had left for France. He’d wanted to be brave, both for her and for himself, and they’d lied to each other, even at the time, that their parting would only be a brief one. Back then, Fitz had still believed that maybe, just _maybe_ , he’d be alright. She’d believed it too. They’d both been wrong.

She felt her breath hitch in her throat at the memory of bidding Fitz goodbye, and began to wonder why she had thought she could do this. Every time she saw an injured soldier, she knew, she was going to think of Fitz, going to wonder if he had suffered as the men before her would be suffering. She felt her palms grow clammy at the thought, felt as though the air had all suddenly been knocked out of her. This was a stupid decision. What was she going to do if there was a man who needed her help, and she froze, memories of Fitz keeping her rooted down? She’d wanted to save lives, but what if she did the opposite?

She’d perhaps have worried further, let the panic sink deeper into her bones, if it weren’t for the sudden shout that rang out across the docks. A young soldier, one obviously returning from a period of leave, had broken away from a small group of men to call out to Jemma and her peers.

“Hey Miss, you’re all volunteer nurses aren’t you?” His question had been directed at one girl in particular, and Jemma wasn’t surprised at who he had chosen to speak to. Even objectively, with her straw-blonde hair and bright green eyes, Linnie was incredibly pretty.

Taken by surprise for a moment, she took a while to answer, and by the time she’d addressed the soldier, a few of his friends had joined them. She seemed nervous, overwhelmed by the situation, and hesitant to speak up.

“Yes, we are.”  

“Say Miss,” another began, addressing Jemma directly, much to her surprise. “Fancy feeling my head? Only I’m feeling a bit unwell, you see,” he said to her, drawing his hand across his forehead and grinning at her as the small group of men all laughed along with him. She was a good enough judge of character to know that the men were only joking, and she was willing to play along.

Casting a long look over his face, Jemma took her time before shaking her head.

“I shouldn’t think so, you look well enough to me. If I were you though, I’d get that nasty thing on your face checked out.”

The man looked puzzled as she pointed at a random part of his face, his hand drifted up feeling for something that wasn’t there and she allowed a second before pretending to squint closer. “Oh no, sorry, it’s just your…my mistake…” she said, pretending to be abashed, and earning another laugh from the man and his friends, before they wandered away, as well as an appreciative look from Linnie and the others.

A moment later and another uniformed man approached them, though this one looked far more stern, and more as though he was expecting them. Sure enough, he quickly shepherded them along the docks, and began murmuring to himself as he checked over a small piece of paper that he held tightly in his hand. Whatever he found seemed to satisfy him as he led them towards a small group of open-top wagons, making a beeline for two in particular, his thick moustache quivering imperiously as he barked out instructions.

“Don’t leave your luggage lying around,” he advised them, eyes barely lingering on any of their faces. “If you let go of anything you value, don’t expect to see it ever again. These,” he gestured at the two vans, “will be your transport.”

“And where exactly are we going?” Rose asked brightly, staring up at the green canvases that half-covered the open rear ends of the trucks. Each of the vehicles had a red cross on a white circled painted on them.

“And you are?” the man asked dangerously.

“Oh, um, Rose sir,” she told him, smile fading slightly. “Rose Adie.” Privately, Jemma was glad she had asked the question, as they’d all been told nothing about their station, and she was keen to find out a little more about what might be in store for them all.

The man glanced down at the list. “Adie, Rose,” he muttered over to himself as he scanned down the list. “Ah. Hospital 39A, this wagon,” he indicated to the truck on the right, the emptier of the two. Beside it, another was already half full with crates and chests.

“Excuse me sir, but aren’t we all travelling together?” Linnie asked, confused, and Jemma felt another wave of fear drift over her. She hadn’t realised they were all to be split up. What if she was left on her own?

“Not according to this,” the man waved the list at her, as though the piece of paper itself had made the decision that the group be divided up. Jemma could hardly say she had become firm friends with the group, but there was a certain safety in numbers, and in the familiar, or so she’d always thought. As it turned out, the man called out two more names (‘Higgins, Elsie and Lawson, Linnie’) and sent them off with Rose, quickly packing them onto the truck, and the three called out their goodbyes as they drove away.

“You two, are on here,” he jerked his head at the other wagon. “Assuming you’re Browne, Julia and Simmons, Jemma?” They both nodded. “You’ll be going to Hospital 37A. It’s a little closer to the Front,” he told them, not bothering to keep the grim note from his voice as they squeezed themselves, and their bags, into the little space left available to them in the back of the wagon, each taking a place on the hard wooden benches that lined the sides. The man called out something else to them as the wagon’s engine started, but his words were drowned out by the roar of two low-flying planes that suddenly passed by, and the by the time Jemma’s ears stopped ringing, they had left the man behind them.

***

There were scarcely any breaks from the van in the days that followed.

The journey was far from smooth, and the two women found themselves buffeted about as they trundled along down, at best, barely maintained, dusty roads, and narrow, uneven dirt paths at worst. She felt every minute of the time they were on the truck, and it seemed as though she barely slept, finding it incredibly difficult to compete with the motion of the wagon, or to become accustomed to sleeping sat up with her back against the hard wooden bars of the van’s exterior. Thankfully the weather wasn’t too cold, but still she felt the evening chill when the last rays of sunlight were swallowed by the horizon, and wished fervently that she’d been able to pack one of her better winter coats.  There was little to do on the journey that could keep her from worrying about what the weeks ahead of her would be like and she had thought, at first, that she would entertain herself by looking at the scenery that passed by, intending to jot down some details in her journal and write to Ellie as soon as she could.

However, as soon as they had left the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer in the distance, Jemma quickly changed her mind. Though not all of the countryside they passed by bore obvious signs that France was at war, it was, at times, eerie and unsettling to pass by villages that were so quiet it seemed that they must be deserted, until they caught sight of gaunt, hunched villagers going about their business. They’d all heard the stories about the German occupation in France, had been told that some villages were close to starvation, and, as they drew closer to the Front, this became clearer and clearer from the state of the buildings they passed, and the looks on the faces of the people they saw. Although the French countryside itself was beautiful, she could not see it for thinking about the suffering of the people who’d seen their country, their towns, and even their homes occupied and all but taken from them.

During the journey, she also found that she did not really know what to say to Julia. The other woman had kept completely to herself during their training, and had only spoken to her fellow trainees when they worked, and even then she said little more than the bare minimum. Jemma didn’t really mind her silence, though. Her stomach was in knots and at times it felt as though she could scarcely catch her breath. She hardly thought talking would make her feel much better. This feeling only worsened as, eventually, they drew closer to a large cluster of tents and she was quickly hit with the startling realisation that this place was a lot bigger then she had ever really anticipated.

They’d pulled up in what seemed to be the central part of the complex, beside a square of grass on which stood a tall flagpole. The flag atop it flew at full mast, the white linen fluttering in the breeze, mirroring the motion of the tens, maybe even hundreds, of thin bedsheets that she’d noticed airing on washing lines as they’d driven in. A few men came to meet the truck, offering their hands to both women in turn as they hopped down onto the grass.

Jemma wondered if she looked as pale and frightened as Julia did. She definitely felt that way.

They both watched uncertainly as men began unloading the chests and crates from the wagon, most of them being stacked in the wooden buildings with slanted roofs immediately beside the square. She assumed they were the storage rooms. If she had thought the docks in Boulogne were alive with action and movement, they were nothing compared to this field hospital. As she craned her neck to look around her, it seemed that there were uniformed nurses everywhere, yet even here they seemed to be outnumbered three or four to one by injured men. And those were just the ones Jemma could see outside. Some hobbled or used crutches to get around, while others had been carried to lie on makeshift beds beside tents she could only assume were wards, obviously being given a chance to get as much fresh air and sunlight as possible.

In the end, she found herself turning a fully three-sixty trying to take in the sights and sounds of this place, unsure whether the awe she felt was out of fear and apprehension or enthusiasm and excitement. She knew only the thrill of complete disbelief. It was amazing to think what was being achieved out here, and she was stunned into silence at the sheer scale of everything.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of two injured soldiers lying out on stretchers, ready, so it appeared, to be transported elsewhere. One had already been half-loaded onto a truck when she caught sight of him. His left leg appeared to be heavily bandaged, but the rest of his body had disappeared into the van, and she couldn’t tell what was wrong with him to mean he was being moved.

Beside her, Julia touched her arm and pointed out a small, dark-haired woman walking with purpose towards them.

“Do you suppose she’s here to meet us?” she whispered, and Jemma thought that this was the most Julia had ever said to her. “She’s quite strict-looking, isn’t she?”

Julia wasn’t wrong, was perhaps understating slightly in fact; the woman had an icy glint to her eye that meant that Jemma was already slightly afraid of her, and she hadn’t even exchanged a single word with her yet.

“You must be our volunteers from London,” she asked when she was within earshot, and Jemma found her American accent to be completely unexpected. She hadn’t realised that nurses had come from so far away to help with the war effort. Both she and Julia nodded, still mute in the face of both the hospital complex and this rather stern-looking nurse. “Julia Browne and Jemma Simmons?” she asked, pausing for them both to identify themselves.  “I’m Sister Melinda May, I’ll be helping train you and get you settled. I trust you didn’t find the journey too tiring?”

Though Jemma suspected that the exhaustion she already felt from the journey alone was buried deep into her very bones, the way in which Sister May asked the question suggested that being tired would not be an excuse to fail to work hard, so she joined Julia in telling May that the journey down had not been too troublesome.

“Well, we’re happy to have you here,” May went on, the lilt to her voice sounding incredibly sincere despite her facial expression remaining exactly as stern as before. “This is the busiest field hospital in the area, so we’ll be glad of any and all help you can offer. You’ll be given a full tour and shown around shortly, however, allow me to briefly indicate a few things for you. These tents,” she pointed out three large, light canvas tents towards the northwest of the site, “are our main three wards, where you’ll be expected to tend to patients when our nurses are unavailable. Here,” she indicated to a similar tent which was smaller and on the other side of a dirt path, “is where we receive soldiers who’ve been injured. At times of extreme pressure, this is also doubles as an extra ward. These are the main sites where treatment takes place, though as volunteers your duties might involve you working elsewhere.”

The final tent she pointed out was situated a few feet away from the others, across a different path.

“This is our operating theatre. It is advised you do not enter the theatre unless expressly instructed,” her tone was so hard and firm at this that it felt strangely incongruous to hear her say, much more brightly, “now, assuming you don’t have any other questions, I’ll show you to your living quarters,” almost in the same breath.

Just as she finished talking, they watched as someone emerged from the theatre, carrying a basin completely full of bloody bandages and cloth. May studied their faces as they took in the sight before them. Jemma didn’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t seem unsatisfied when they finally turned back to her.

“That man was brought to us a little while ago, his arm had been damaged in battle. We attempted to save it but infection set in. We were forced to amputate.” 

“Are all the soldiers here so very badly hurt?” Jemma asked, and if the question was a naïve one, May didn’t feel the need to point it out.

“Yes, usually, they are. Of course, some men are in better states; they might just need broken bones setting or cuts cleaning, but most often, we deal with more serious, life-threatening injuries and the men we treat here are quite frequently amputees,” she warned them.

“And those men?” Julia asked, indicating to the trucks driving away with the men Jemma had noticed earlier. “Are they being sent away because they’re too sick? Or because they’re getting better?”

“No man is ever too sick for us to tend here,” May assured her. “Even when men are beyond our help, we attempt to bring them comfort and relieve their suffering until the end. However, those men you mentioned required a form of long-term treatment better provided by recovery facilities away from the Front.”

Julia nodded thoughtfully and, with nothing more for either of them to say, May lead them away through the labyrinth of tents and wooden stores. As they walked, she named more buildings than Jemma could possibly hope remember in that moment alone, from the communications tent, the mess tent and cook’s hut, to the sluice, pharmacy and post room, and all she could do was hope and pray that she would learn her way around quickly enough and not get lost.

Eventually, after having left the main site a few yards behind them, they came to a small cluster of tents, set aside as living quarters. Some had small wooden tables, oil lamps, and a chair or two near the entrance, others had a few items of clothing hanging outside, the tent ropes doubling as washing lines. May drew back the curtain on one, and Jemma stepped into a modestly sized space, small enough that the four spindly-looking beds that filled it almost touched. There was just enough space between each one to fit a modest and battered looking bedside cabinet.

“Please select a bed, and ensure that it is impeccably made at all times. You will find a chamber pot underneath. I’ve been instructed to remind you that we do not permit you to wear powders or scents, and anything but plain clothing – stockings and boots especially – is discouraged. We want you to avoid attracting any attention from the men here.”

Jemma privately thought that the men should have more important things to worry about, and that they should be the ones to keep their attentions to themselves, but then remembered the group of soldiers at the docks, and considered that many had been away from their wives for a great deal of time. She shuddered slightly.

“It is strongly recommended you remove any jewellery too,” May went on, eyes drifting to the simple silver chain around Jemma’s neck. “Indeed, Matron will likely insist upon it. Please change quickly into your uniforms, I’ll wait outside and escort you to Matron’s office now, she’s expecting you.”

She exchanged a quick, worried look with Julia as May left, before hastily unclipping the necklace Fitz had given her for her birthday and concealing it at the bottom of her bag, all the while sincerely hoping that Matron would be a little less intimidating than Sister May.

***

As it turned out, Matron was a tall, slim English woman of around fifty with thin lips, wispy hair, and a perpetual, all-consuming dislike of volunteer nurses. Indeed, she was at least a hundred times scarier than May had been. The moment she and Julia had set foot in her office, she had begun rattling off the rules of the hospital site in a cold, steady tone.

Alongside the dress codes, there was to be no running without permission, no fraternising with the soldiers in any capacity, and a whole host of other regulations that made even Jemma, rule-conscious as she was, feel as though her head was spinning. Volunteers, she told them, were not to interfere with the work of _actual_ nurses, and were not allowed to complete any task for a patient unless expressly instructed to do so by someone else. Their duties were to ensure that the nurses could do their job smoothly.

At this, Jemma’s heart sank a little. She had no aversion to the hard tasks Matron had listed – making beds, cleaning bandages and clearing up the wards were all a part of hospital life, but she had hoped also to help the injured too. But the way Matron spoke, it did not seem as though she would even be allowed to converse with them. She didn’t have much time to worry about that though, as Matron quickly set the two girls to task, firstly instructing them to properly strip and remake a bed to time.

“We expect all aspects of this hospital to be neat and orderly. Just because we’re located within a warzone doesn’t mean we need look like one,” she told them as she timed them with her pocket watch. Jemma finished a moment or two before time, and thought she caught an approving look on May’s face when she chanced a look at the two older women, as she waited. Matron, however, slowly made her way around the beds, checking their work. She proceeded to criticise Julia for the creases she’d left in her pillowcases, and warned her to tuck in the sheets and blankets tighter. She said nothing at all, however, as she measured the length of the fold Jemma had made in her own blankets and checked the corners of the under-sheet, simply indicated silently that she should follow her outside.

Dismayed, she left Julia to make the rest of the beds in all three tents and allowed herself to be lead to the corner of the complex given over to the washing basins and linen presses. Under Matron’s instructions, she proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon stood in the direct heat of the summer sun, boiling and pressing sullied bandages until they were white and flat as new, before rolling them and packing them away. By the time night fell and she finished her work, her hands were red raw and painful, and it was all she could do to eat a few mouthfuls of bread and some thin vegetable soup before trailing back to her living quarters, ready for her new bed, no matter how uncomfortable it looked. Julia appeared to already be asleep, so she undressed and washed as quietly as she could and clambered into bed. It wasn’t until she snuffed out her bedside lamp and was half asleep that she realised she hadn’t pictured Fitz’s death once since she stepped off the truck that morning.


	6. 5. Many Times I’ve Cried

_29 th August, 1918  
_ _Soissons, France_

Time moved strangely at the field hospital, and life as a volunteer nurse was simultaneously everything and nothing like she expected. It had required more adjustments than she had ever anticipated, but once they had been made, the days ran by relatively smoothly, often blending into one another until she learnt to stop naming days ‘Monday’ or ‘Thursday’ and learnt instead to count them by the deliveries they received, or the meals they ate.

For at least the first fortnight or so, she had been forced to adjust to the idea that she would not be nursing patients in the traditional sense of the word, and had had to make her peace with the idea that at least half of the qualified nurses there viewed herself and Julia with great distaste and disapproval. The idea had stung her at first, and she was resentful. She had expected volunteering to offer her more than _only_ the menial tasks, had resented the fact that she was likely more qualified than most of the people here put together. The cuts only started to heal over once she recalled a piece of advice she'd given to Fitz, sat out in the schoolyard one day many years ago. She'd been cleaning up the scrapes on his knees from where some of the older boys had pushed him over, and he'd been lamenting the injustice of it all; being bullied because he was smarter than the others. 

" _And I am, Jemma, I_ am _smarter then them_."

She'd scolded him slightly for that. It was no use telling others that he was smarter. It wouldn’t win him friends, and simply _being_ cleverer than other people wouldn’t solve his problems.

" _You must_ act _smarter if you want to be happier and make your problems disappear, Fitz."_

It was with that thought in mind that her cycle of stripping beds, washing sheets, making beds again, and cleaning everything in sight became more bearable. Besides, while it was true that she missed the idea of learning to become a ‘proper’ nurse, Jemma quickly learnt that the notion of ‘care’ meant far more than swabbing wounds and changing dressings. She welcomed the times when, having finished her other duties, the busiest nurses requested she make the drugs rounds in the ward. All the medication was already set out, so all she had to do was help then men swallow it down. She started using that time, and other free moments, to simply speak to the soldiers, perhaps reading to those whose eyes were still too swollen and sore from gas attacks, or helping those whose hands still shook too perilously to write a letter home. She quickly found that just having someone there to listen to what they had to say was often something they appreciated as much as having someone to tend to their physical scars.

Her only other real, recurrent duty thus far had involved writing letters to the families of soldiers who’d died at the hospital. When men perished in the field of battle, their families were sent a letter like the one she had received about Fitz, but when men lost their final battle under the care of the nurses and doctors in field hospitals, the task of informing relatives fell to the medical staff. And, though this was not a job she enjoyed, she threw herself into the task whenever she was asked to do so, took the time to write down all the words she’d wished she’d been able to read months before. She strongly hoped she could bring the tiniest sense of comfort to those who needed it, as she once had.

And as she wrote those letters, as she told families to grieve but not to blame themselves, to remember their son or husband or father as they had lived – their beloved, cherished relative – and not as they had died – a soldier – she subconsciously began taking her own advice. Slowly, the way she thought of Fitz began to change. She began to remember him hunched over a table, squinting at his notebook as the daylight faded and it became too dark to work at his designs any longer, rather than squatting in a trench trying to read the books she had occasionally sent him by lamplight. She came to think of him at his work bench, fingers stained black with ink and oil and pencil lead, rather than red with sticky blood. And although there had been no real reason to ascribe any guilt to herself regarding Fitz’s death, at first, she’d blamed herself anyway. Gradually this impulse started to fade away. The dreams in which Fitz was killed by sniper fire as he tried to read a letter she’d sent, the tiny flame of his lighter giving him away, gradually subsided. Slowly, she stopped waking gasping for breath, forcing herself to remember that Fitz died a hero in battle, not picked off by a sniper for reading a note. And although for a while she’d let herself entertain a fantasy that she had built the gun that ended his life, this too gradually died away to nothing. It was preposterous to assume a German soldier had killed her friend with a machine _she_ had built, for the British army no less, and she knew she was only making the assumption to find a way to blame herself for something she had nothing to do with.

She still had difficult times, of course. There were nights when the midnight air came alive with the sound of his voice, whispering to her, his words trapped somewhere between her cheek and her pillow, trapped amongst the tears that collected on the cotton pillowslip. There were soldiers that looked a little like him, others that sounded like him, some with the brightest blue eyes that held her captivated for a moment as she imagined Fitz’s stubborn, searching gaze staring out at her until she realised her mistake and continued on with her duties, always a little shaken up for the rest of her shift. Sometimes it was hard to read to soldiers, or speak with them, hard to compete with the bitterness at the thought that no one had been able to do any of this for Fitz. She was nothing, however, if not able to rise above such thoughts and they too became just another part of daily life until they subsided altogether. In the end, every thought she had while she worked blended in easily with the hours of cleaning, tidying, reading, and writing. 

Some cycles were as easily broken as they were made, however, and her own was shattered completely over a month after she arrived in France, as Julia shook her from a restless sleep, her hands cold against Jemma’s arms and her tone frantic.

“Jemma!” Julia hissed, “Jemma wake up!”

“What is it?” she cried, still half-asleep and panicked as she tried to sit up.

“Listen!”

Jemma held her breath and went to strain her ears to listen, but it was unnecessary. As she came to herself, she could hear that the night air all around the hospital site had come to life. Shout after indiscernible shout reached their tent, sometimes one after the other in call-and-response cacophony, at other times, men seemed to be shouting to no one in particular. She could hear the ruckus of horses’ hooves against the dry dirt paths around the site, the sounds of nurses shouting out instructions she couldn’t quite hear properly.

“What’s going on?” she whispered to Julia, panicking now for a whole different reason.

“I think there’s been another battle. I just heard someone say they finally pushed the Germans back. But there must have been a lot of casualties.”

The two stared at each other in silence for a moment, and Jemma watched as Julia’s eyes shone in the darkness, Jemma’s bed creaking and dipping slightly as Julia perched lightly beside her.

Wordlessly, they listened to the commotion for a moment longer.

“Do you think we should…?” Jemma asked, not really sure what she wanted to say.                                                     

They’d been given no instructions to help, and Matron – and the other nurses – were always very clear; do _nothing_ unless expressing instructed otherwise.

Slowly, Julia nodded.

“Yes,” she said firmly, and promptly seemed surprised at her own tone. “I mean, I know no-one’s come for us but surely there must be something, anything, we can do to help.”

“I agree.”

“You do?” Julia seemed to need Jemma’s concurrence as much as she needed hers.

She nodded, teeth worrying at her lower lip as she climbed out of bed and removed her nightgown, shivering at the night air. For August, it was oddly chilly tonight. They’d had a long stretch of hot summer weather since they’d arrived, but the past few days had bought a change; the air was heavy with the promise of summer storms.

To her left, Julia lit a match, the scratch and hiss as it flared to life a comfortingly familiar sound in the face of the uproar outside. Once the room was aglow with orange light, the two changed quickly, both pinning their hair up and choosing their best, sturdiest boots before exiting their tent, each with a lantern in hand.

The ground underfoot was slippery with dew as they rushed across the now-familiar terrain into the main part of the complex, the sounds growing louder and clearer, other noises building on top of what they had detected before; the air now a patchwork of panicked shouts, clearer orders, and anguished cries. The screams of pain hadn’t been audible from so far away, but as they drew closer, the sheer scale of the disaster the hospital was facing became clear to them. 

The onslaught must have been sudden, Jemma thought, as she passed nurses tending to men where they'd fallen, others trying to help men to beds. She began to wonder if they even _had_ enough beds for all the men she could see. 

From across the way, they heard the familiar voice of Ben, one of the normally calm and jolly kitchen and storeroom hands cry out,

“Permission to run, Matron?” even as he broke out into a dash, barely acknowledging Matron’s two-word reply.

“Granted, Robinson!”

He came hurtling past them a moment later, heading towards the admissions tent, and, as Matron hurried past immediately behind him, she caught sight of the two of them and slowed her pace slightly, a questioning eyebrow raised at them.

Matron had never shown anything more than disdain at their presence, but surely, Jemma thought, she couldn’t want to deride them at a time like this.

“What can we do to help Matron?” Julia asked, voice breathless.

“Just…” Matron paused, glancing beadily down at them. “Don’t get in our way,” she sighed.

Well, she’d been wrong.

“What do we do now?” Julia asked when they were alone again.

“Ben,” Jemma suggested after a moment’s thought. “He seemed to know what he had to do. Even if we just carry supplies for him or something,” she added as she moved off towards the admissions tent. Julia followed her quickly.

“Yes, good idea.”

Once they drew back the entrance on the shelter, they found, for the first time, that the admissions tent had been turned into a ward of sorts, as May had warned them. Where only a few beds were full at any one time normally, all were occupied now, and the usually quiet area was filled with an almost-deafening noise, a noise made up of so many different pieces and parts, that she truly had no idea of all the sources, or what to focus on first.

Her eyes eventually found Ben in the dim light of the tent, bent over a bed, hand pressed down firmly on a man’s shoulder. Somehow, he caught sight of the two of them as they entered, called them over, fear etched deeply into his face.

“Do either of you know what to do?”

Jemma glanced down, finding that the man on the bed was tensed, his head jerked back and his limbs in spasm, moving erratically.

“How long has he been like this?” Jemma asked, crossing around the bed and adding her weight to his other shoulder and adjusting the pillow underneath the man’s head. When she drew her hand back her fingers were coated in fresh blood. The man must have taken quite a blow to his head to produce this reaction.

“I don’t know the men around him called me over, said it just started a second ago. I didn’t know what to do I just thought he might hurt himself so I held him down,” Ben glanced up at her, his eyes wide and wild in panic.

“You did the right thing,” she assured him gently. “Where’s Matron? He’ll need a nurse and maybe a doctor,”

“I don’t know, there was some other, bigger emergency with some of the men brought to Ward A.”

“What, bigger than _this_?” Julia asked from behind them, shocked. “I mean, this whole tent in general?” Jemma couldn’t work out exactly what emotion the note to her voice signified, couldn't name it properly, but she knew instantly that she felt the same.

“Apparently,” Ben replied, voice grim. 

“I’ll see if I can find anyone,” Julia told them, hurrying off.

“We can’t wait,” Jemma said a moment later, watching her leave. “I read a paper about this once, his brain’s going to be starved of oxygen if we leave it much longer.”

“But we can’t do anything, we can’t administer, we don't even know _which_ drugs we'd need!" Ben protested, eventually catching sight of the look on Jemma's face. "Do we?" 

“I need to see if we have any Barbituric acid derivatives in the store,” Jemma said quickly, engulfed in a vivid memory of a class Professor Weaver had taught about the effects of the drug on the nervous system. It wasn’t ideal, but she might be able to stop the man’s seizure before it caused even more damage to his head. “Can you hold him on your own?”

“I – yes, but,” Ben’s voice was doubtful, but Jemma was already off and running. “Simmons! Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes!” she shouted back, running to the store now, not bothered about asking permission, her heart all but beating out of her chest. She threw the door back, nearly dislodging one of the lamps from where it hung on the wall as she did so, hands fumbling over boxes, drifting over labels until she found what she wanted. They didn’t have much, and what they did have wasn’t ideal; she knew the nurses might not think or care to use it on the man and for a second, she doubted herself. Research into this treatment was still in its infancy, she knew because she kept up with medical journals, even during the war.

Breathing deeply to steady herself, she mulled it all over as she ran back, finding Julia had returned, alone, to the man’s bedside.

“There was no-one!” she cried. "I couldn't find anyone at all, anyone I did see seemed to be treating someone just as bad or worse off!" 

“It’s okay, I know what to do,” Jemma gasped out, breathless. She was certain a little of this drug, a cautious amount to say the least, would certainly not harm the man, and would likely stop his seizure altogether. She’d mentally gone over every class she'd taken that could be relevant to her situation, and couldn’t think of a single thing to make her doubt her conviction in this.

“Jemma, are you sure about this?” Ben asked as she hovered, needle in hand, over the man’s arm, trying to find a vein.

“Yes,” she told him, without hesitation and, in that instant, she’d never been surer of anything. “If we let him go on much longer, he’s going to sustain permanent damage.”

Julia seemed as though she wanted to dart out and pull Jemma’s arm back, and Ben looked doubtful for a moment but let her continue, watching her slide the needle into the soldier’s arm. The men around them were quiet, watching their friend as the three of them treated him.

The result was almost instantaneous. His tremors began subsiding, his whole body relaxing, and then, slowly, he began gaining consciousness. She caught sight of the men around her nodding appreciatively and let out a breath she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding.

“He needs oxygen therapy too,” she told Ben and he looked confused.

“But that’s…that’s for the gas attacks. Isn’t it?”

“These types of events can keep oxygen from getting to the brain,” she told him patiently, confident in her knowledge of the subject. “We need to use oxygen therapy now, just as a precaution. If any damage has been done, it won’t reverse it, but we can try and stop it getting any worse.” There had been a paper released from Oxford University only last year on oxygen therapy techniques. It had fascinated Jemma and she vividly remembered reading it, knowing it was reliable if for no other reason than that it had been written by the very same man who lent his name to the apparatus they used, both at the hospital and out in the field, to help victims of gas attacks. Haldane equipment involved large, heavy pressurised cylinders, all hooked up to regulators, reservoir bags and face masks; they were heavy and cumbersome, and she had no hope of retrieving one herself, so she sent Ben off to the stores.

When she turned back she found Julia staring at her, mouth half-open.

“What?” she asked, worried.

“Jemma, that was _amazing._  How did you know how to do all of that?”

 Jemma just shook her head, it had been nothing close to amazing, just what needed to be done.

 “My classes at university came in handy, shall we say,” she said, giving Julia a bracing smile as she passed by. “Come on, there’s plenty more we can do. If all the other nurses are elsewhere, someone has to do something for the men in here.”

There had been no form of triage or assessment done on any of the men, so it was decided that the best thing that could be done was for them to check over each patient until more help arrived. There were so many men that the least critically injured had had to find space to sit on the floor – they were crouched beside the tent entrance or between beds. Once Ben had returned, and the oxygen therapy had been administered, Jemma, falling into the role of leader more naturally than she had ever expected, set him to task providing the least injured soldiers with clean, fresh drinking water, and with writing up their admissions cards.

Julia had put out a call for nursing assistance much earlier, so they just had to hope that help came soon. Squaring her shoulders, she bent over her next patient. She’d do whatever she could until then.

***

Once she’d broken the rules regarding treatment, doing so again and again became easier.

While she’d been focussing on calming down the first soldier’s seizure, the din of the tent had seemed to die away, but once she came back to herself, it all returned in full force, and seemed to have increased tenfold. After the first patient, she quickly lost track of how fast, or slowly, the time passed.

Some strange base-level instinct had kicked in, and she and Julia simply went about tending to wounds and, in Jemma’s case, administering pain relief to as many men as possible. The first time she’d gone to do the latter, she’d hovered, worried for a second about how much trouble this would get her into but, in the face of the man’s screams of pain, Jemma found that, for the first time in a long time, she couldn’t care less about the rules. They didn't hold up in a situation like this and as such she had no real use of them.

There was a fleeting moment after she moved onto her sixth patient in which she actually acknowledged, surprised, just how well she was coping with the situation.

It wasn't until about the seventeenth critically injured soldier that it occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t really coping at all.

Although she had seen many bad injuries from afar, had bandaged a couple of less serious lacerations, and had even once or twice had the unenviable task of clearing up surgery after an amputation, she’d never before been met with so many serious injuries so fresh from the battlefield. And as she darted from one bed to the next, the bloodied cuts and shattered limbs soon merged into one blurry vision of rivers of red and piles of broken bones. The men’s cries and the way the begged for pain relief and, often, for death, all rose to one high-pitched scream stuck inside her ears.

There were men whose limbs were already gone, men who would need to have what little was left of their arms or legs – no more than bloodied stumps, the remaining flesh limp and tattered like the fraying fabric of the flag in the centre of the complex – removed. She saw flashes of shiny white bone poking between sliced thighs, internal organs now on the outside, and the pitiful, splintered remnants of jawbones, and as soon as she saw them once she quickly saw them all over and over again.

Eventually, her mind was racing at a hundred yards a second just to keep up with it all, and it was only natural that it should falter eventually. The first hurdle came as she treated a man whose arm would surely have to be cut off by the surgeons; it seemed as though it was already nearly severed through, though it was hard to tell underneath his ripped shirt. She’d taken him to be unconscious as she checked him over, checked his heartbeat, made sure she cleaned his wound as best she could, before making a hastily scribbled note of what she had done, so that Ben could properly fill in the soldier’s admission card. But as she went to leave him, the soldier must have been more aware of his situation than she had first thought, because he half sat up as she passed, gasping for air like a fish that had been landed on the shore, crying out,

“Lady, please don’t let them take my arm!” as he reached out for her, blind with terror. His good arm found her own, his large hand closing tightly around her wrist and holding on so tight she thought he might break the bone. Panicking, she felt her head swim slightly, and had it always been quite _so_ hot and noisy in here? Had the smell of blood and death always been quite so thick in the air?

The soldier’s fingers left three sticky lines of mud on her arm as they skidded over her skin and she attempted once, twice to wrench her arm free. She didn’t mean to be quite so harsh, but something in the wild, distant look behind his eyes was too much to bear. Somehow, in spite of his condition, the man did not let go. She looked him over quickly and could see his thin chest heaving in time with his ragged breathing. He had the look of a once strong man who’d wasted away under the strain of war and somewhere, dimly, she registered that he was just scared, just in need of reassurance, but she was scared too now, the fear sudden and all-consuming and, without further warning she found herself hot and faint and overwhelmed. Suddenly, the last thing she wanted was to carry on standing inside this godforsaken canvas tent full of dead and dying soldiers.

“No, I…I promise. I’ll tell them not to take your arm,” she half-cried at the man, finally extracting herself from his grasp and turning away. She’d almost taken herself the full way across the tent and out into the night before she stopped herself, drawing in a few deep, steadying breaths. She leant forward, hands on her thighs as she calmed herself down and, from her right, a stocky, thickset man with a deep, meandering cut on his cheek approached her, catching her attention with a (far gentler) hand on her shoulder. He had his arm held up in makeshift sling, but otherwise seemed to have gotten away with just a few cuts and bruises.

“Please, nurse, this one here I think he’s…” he didn’t want to say the words, simply gestured to the bed next to him, and, sure enough, the soldier who occupied it was pale and feverish, the front of his uniform completely slick with dark red blood. His whole body was convulsing and a thick, grotesque bubbling sound was coming from deep within his throat and chest, a trickle of red dripping slowly out of the corner of his mouth.

He was choking, and bleeding out so fast she doubted she could save him.

_Oh God, this man was going to die._

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t seen death before now, and she’d even grown accustomed (or as accustomed as possible) to the resigned way the nurses at the hospital often spoke about it. Although their words were never trivial or insensitive, the women bore all the hallmarks of people who had seen too much death to ever be shocked by it again. She still remembered the first time someone had sadly said the words, ‘he won’t last the day’ to her.

That person had been May, coming to check on a man whose admission card Jemma was filling in. The two had left his bedside together, and May had shaken her head, frustration biting at her tone as she told Jemma that the man would be dead before sundown. She had been right, and it had felt as though someone had struck Jemma on the cheek.

Jemma had seen a great amount of the older woman during her time at the hospital, suspected she was keeping an eye on herself and Julia in her own quiet, caring way, and thus, found herself far from surprised when she heard her call out as she tried to do something, anything, for the man in front of her. His choking seemed to have petered out but still she felt she had to make him comfortable.

“Simmons. Come on, step away now,” May told her as she appeared beside her, her hand soft but insistent at Jemma’s arm, but Jemma resisted.

She had to make the man comfortable. After all, she’d want to be made comfortable if that was all that was left for her.

She would have hoped Fitz would have been comfortable. She looked down at the man below her. His hair was the same colour as Fitz’s had been, but dyed blood-red at the roots.

“Simmons, it’s time to leave now.” May was still there, but Jemma had pressed past her, and the other woman was behind her now, one hand on each arm, her grip tightening on her elbows, as the soldier from before had squeezed at her wrist.

What if Fitz had choked to death? What if he’d lingered on for hours? What if no one had made him comfortable?

Oh God. She had to make the man comfortable.

He was about to die.

Comfortable. She had to make Fitz comfortable.

Fitz was about to die.

_Comfortable._

_Dead._

“Jemma!”

This time May’s voice was sharp, and something in the use of her given name cleared her mind a little. May sensed the change in her and, as she pulled her away, her voice was soft again, soft and gentle and soothing in her ear.  

“You’ve done everything you can, now come with me. Come on.”

A moment later, and the thick, chilly night-time mist from earlier launched a fresh assault upon her burning cheeks, and as hot as she had been, it took only seconds for the wet air to cool her down, and turn her panicked shaking into uncontrollable shivers.

“I’m sorry,” she eventually gasped out, acutely aware of May’s hands on her arms, still supporting her, holding her up. “I know we shouldn’t have been treating them, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

Instantly, and completely without warning, May was moving her again, pulling her firmly and quickly across the grass, wet dewdrops clinging to Jemma's stockings and shoes, soaking through to her clothes to settle on her ankles and feet. They didn’t stop moving until they were back at the habitation tents, when May came to a jarring halt beside the wooden table and chair set outside the tent she shared with Julia, guiding Jemma into one of the seats, pushing her down perhaps a little too harshly. Taking May’s sudden movements to be anger, she tried to apologise again.

“I really am sorry. I’ll report to Matron as soon as – ”

“Do you really think that’s why I’m here?” May asked, cutting her off. There was fire in her voice and a tremor to the edges of her words.

Jemma was caught off-guard for a second and closed her mouth, unsure of what to say.

“I – well, I don’t know.” 

Though they could still hear the noise and commotion from the other side of the hospital site, it was eerily quiet around them, the wind whispering secrets through the trunks of the sparse copse of trees bordering their domestic tents.

“This isn’t a time for rules and regulations, Jemma,” May told her quietly, surprising her with the continued use of her given name. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t angry at first, when I found out that the two of you were treating patients alone, with no supervision,” she paused, clearly searching for the right words, and when she looked over at Jemma, finally taking a seat opposite her, Jemma was met with the overwhelming desire to avoid May’s gaze.

“That man died because of me, didn’t he?” she asked, her voice small, tears threatening to spill out from the corners of her eyes.

She would not cry. Not now. Not in front of someone else.

“No.” May’s voice was so firm and left so little room for discussion that Jemma forgot herself, snapping her head up to look at her. “That man would not have survived, no matter who was there to treat him.”

The silence that fell between them was nothing short of excruciating until May went on.

“Browne took her leave from the ward much sooner than you did. She told me about how you stopped a man from having a seizure. Even some of my nurses wouldn’t have had the confidence to do that.” There was an obvious note of pride in May’s voice, and she had half a smile tugging at one side of her mouth. Jemma felt a rush of heat creep up the back of her neck.

“You did _well_ , Simmons. In fact, I’m impressed. Not just at your medical knowledge but at how long you coped on your own. But you didn’t have to _do_ that. I’ve seen the way you work around here. You never ask for help, even when you need . You don’t always have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders like that. If you do, what happened before? Well it happens more and more often." She paused but then added sadly, "I should know.”

Whatever that meant, Jemma didn’t dare ask, just kept staring at the table between herself and May, sniffing as quietly possible and blinking her eyes heavily, hoping that would be enough to chase the tears away.

For what had to be the fourth or fifth time that night, May took her by surprise again, this time by laying a hand lightly over Jemma’s where it rested on the table, for just the briefest of moments.

“Who’s Fitz?”

She froze. She hadn’t realised she’d spoken his name aloud back there.

“He’s…” she swallowed. Until now, Fitz had been her own. She’d kept him a fiercely guarded secret. But if there’d ever been a person she’d trust with his memory, it was May. “He  _was_ my best friend. My everything really. I’d known him since we were just small children, barely ever spent a day away from him before the…” at this, her voice cracked and a few tears broke free. “Well. Anyway. He’s gone now.”

“And he’s why you’re here?” 

Jemma nodded.

“Had you hoped to find some comfort?”

Again, she only inclined her head.

“And have you?”

Another nod. “I’d been doing well. Until today.”

May hummed understandingly.

“Helping others won’t make you forget that help never reached him,” she told her simply. “But it does help to ease the pain a little.”

“I just needed to do something,” she began and it was like she’d spent a month with a gag bound around her mouth and, with it now lifted, she was suddenly ready to talk about Fitz. To remember all the things – both good and bad – that she’d been repressing. May listened carefully, nodding and smiling and never pressing Jemma to talk more than she needed to.

When Jemma finally broke off, she was shocked at the unguarded expression on May’s face. She’d never seen the other woman’s features arrange themselves into such a raw expression before.

“I had a close friend die in battle too. Phil…” she trailed off, her lips dancing around the name like it was a prayer. But when eventually she spoke again, her voice had regained its business-like tone. “Goodness look, it’s close to sunrise. We both need to attempt to get some sleep for the day ahead.”

She rose, and Jemma mirrored her.

“I’m going to have a word with Matron about the two of you tomorrow, see if we can’t get your duties upgraded, especially now. And speaking of, Browne should be along shortly, but you should get to bed now."

“Yes. Thank you Sister. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

May was already a good distance away when Jemma paused at the entrance to her tent and turned back around.

“Sister May, I …thank you.”

If May heard her, she gave little indication as she retreated back into the early-morning gloom.

***

Jemma would have liked to have buried the memory of the night, and the feelings it had awoken, down deep somewhere, but that soon proved impossible.

Word of her work had spread like wildfire, and she was immediately called in front of Matron later that morning. In between her scathing chastisements and angry threats of reprisals, Jemma was left to assume that she and Julia had been promoted to a higher rank and she finally found herself in a position to work more as a nurse and less as…well, whatever she had been before.

She spent the day learning about her increased duties, as well as being cornered by many of the nurses, all suddenly keen to ask her about her training and about her classes at university. At lunchtime, Ben and the other porters and kitchen hands crowded round to congratulate her, as did many of the more mobile patients, and many of the soldiers on rotation away from the Front. She hadn’t wanted praise or congratulations, however, and tried to shy away from it all.

It would perhaps have been bearable if it weren’t for the fact that all she remembered of the night was how a man had choked to death in front of her eyes, and how all she had done was think of Fitz. The mental image she’d made up of him dying in the way the young soldier in front of her had done, plagued her sleep and haunted her the whole day through. By the time evening fell, and she went to leave the ward she was working on, Jemma was exhausted, and would be glad if she never heard mention of the night before again.

“Um, excuse me? Miss?” a cry went up from one of the men nearby, and her head jerked up immediately, trying to work out who had called out to her. She picked him out instantly and moved over to his bed.

“I just want to say, I’m sorry about what I did last night.” He caught sight of the faint purplish tinge on her wrist. “I had no idea what I was doing, I – I didn’t mean to.” The man looked genuinely distressed, so Jemma shook her head quickly, hand immediately at his shoulder as he went to try and sit up, keeping him lying down on the bed. It took her a second to place him, but eventually she remembered him as the soldier who'd begged her to stop the doctors amputating his arm, latching onto her wrist and refusing to let go.

She hushed him gently. “It’s okay. There’s no harm done. Nothing to worry about.” She smiled and, gradually, he matched her with a grin of his own. In a different light and at a different time, he wasn’t so thin and wasted away as she’d first thought, was stronger than he first appeared, and –

“They saved your arm!”

“Yep!” he smiled again, glancing down almost proudly at it. “Didn’t think they were going to, but they did. Something about the quality of treatment at admission. Apparently I must have had a really great nurse looking after me,” he said pointedly, still smiling.

“Oh, I’m not a nurse, just a volunteer.”

He tilted his head slightly, then shrugged his one good shoulder. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just grateful for what you did.”

She simply smiled, picking up his treatment notes and scanning over them.

“These all look good,” she told him. “Looks like you’re going to make a full recovery Private...” she checked his notes before replacing them with a smile, “Triplett.”

***

Private Antoine Triplett must have been in a lot of pain, but still he smiled every day. She liked that the best about him and on her eighth visit to his bedside, she told him so.

“You know, you should smile more too. You have a pretty smile.”

“I don’t smile to be pretty, Private Triplett. I smile when I am amused, or happy. Or impressed. So, I suggest you work a little harder if you want me to smile more at your bedside.”

“If that’s a challenge – ”

“It is.”

“ – then I accept.”

***

Private Triplett’s means of addressing her, and constant suggestions that she should smile, or do things a certain way, all delivered as jokes and with a large smile, got out of hand by the end of his first week in her care and, no matter how hard she tried, she could not bring herself to scold him for it. Instead she worked on her retorts, marching every sarcastic comment, and every ill-placed joke, with one of her own.

He seemed to appreciate that more than the adherence to any strict rules of care, telling herself something new about himself every time she visited, and by the end of his second week at the hospital, she suddenly realised she he was now someone she would readily count amongst the number of her friends.


	7. 6. The Many Ways I’ve Tried

_8 th September, 1918  
_ _Wrenbar Home of Recovery, France_

Leopold.

Alexander.

Fitz.

His penmanship was still a little shaky, and his handwriting more generally was nothing short of disastrous, but he couldn’t really care less. He’d come a long way since he’d arrived at the recovery centre away from the Front and this, the three words laid out legibly on the page in front of him, the pencil gripped more steadily than he could have imagined between his fingers, was evidence of that.

It had not been long ago that he would not have been able to align those three words and realise that they were signifiers of his own identity, much less stop his hand shaking long enough to write them all down together. His hands had twitched once or twice as he painstakingly wrote each letter, but he suspected that the words looked as unrefined as they did not because of his weak hands, but simply his own poor handwriting. Besides, he'd happily take the recovery of his memories over good handwriting any day.

People had told him over and over again that things would ‘all come flooding back’ to him, but his progress felt more like the steady drip of the broken tap in the faucet in the corner of the small ward he was on. Things were at least much more comfortable here; only eight or ten beds in each room, things much quieter than when he had spent his days in a sprawling tent eight or nine times the size of his new room. Though the home’s position was of some small strategic importance, and technically at risk of aerial attack, this had never materialised, so far at least, and the building, an old, disused, priory that had been given over as a medical facility once the war began, felt safe enough most of the time. 

It was, Fitz thought, due to this improved environment that what little memory he’d regained had returned so swiftly to him. Though he’d at first hated the idea of the change, Sister May had been right to suggest he be transferred.

In the end, it had been the ‘Leopold’ part that had come to him first, while he sat up eating breakfast one day. He’d expected a rush of memory, a thrill of recollection, however it was nothing like that. The information had simply been there where it had not been a moment before. And he known instantly, in that same moment, that he had always truly disliked that name, would use it over ‘Leo’ to be sure, but that was it. It was perhaps this which spurred him on to remember his surname, so great was his discomfort at having every person in the recovery home call him either ‘Leopold’ or ‘Leo’ for the better part of a fortnight.

There was a slightly greater sense of excitement and occasion surrounding the moment he recalled his surname, if only for the reason that he’d been trying so hard to work out what he had once preferred to be called. If he never heard the name ‘Leo’ again it would be too soon. Ironic as it was, he had been reading a book by the light of his lamp, late into the night, when, half-asleep, the word ‘fits’ took shape in his own mind.

‘Alexander’ had come more slowly, and much more naturally, just appearing and slotting itself organically between his two other words as he recited them to himself one day, as he’d been taught to do in the hopes of bringing back other memories with them.

In fact, this latter had happened _so_ naturally, there was no sudden realisation at all. This had worried him for a while; what if there were things in his mind that he’d forgotten, and knew again, but he hadn’t felt the sudden dawning comprehension of their presence within his head? Perhaps he’d remembered things and didn’t even realise. That wasn’t a thought he liked to dwell on too much.

Besides, the whole thing was such a complicated process, it made his head hurt. But with his name back at the front of his mind, he had begun to feel more like himself, and was holding out hope that just that simple information alone would be enough for someone within the army to find out more about him. Once they had his name, the home had dispatched an administrative request for his army file, but the department that dealt with these requests was both far away and inundated with work, so they didn’t expect a response for a few more weeks at least. He was happy to do the waiting, however. He’d already waited long enough to discover his own _name_ , and that knowledge had made him much calmer. He thought that somewhere, deep down, all the anger and bitterness, all the times his temper rose beyond his control, had been wholly linked to a deep-seated fear that he would not ever gain his memory back in full enough detail.

Now, however, as things came back in fragments; his name, an image of his street in London, details about his studies at university and, most importantly to him, his intelligence, he came to feel a greater sense of accomplishment, and a greater sense of determination to go along with that.

Gradually, he began feeling less as though he had been split into pieces of shattered glass, less like scattered crystal fragments that would never slot together again. As time passed at the recovery centre, he began to believe that his mind was not irreparable, was more like a cracked mirror – all the pieces were there, and in the right place, he just needed to fill in the spaces, so that eventually, he’d be able to look into it and see an image of himself. He didn’t even care if that reflection was different from the one he’d have seen before the war, was probably more damaged and cracked, didn’t care that the war had probably changed him, so long as he got back a little of what he’d lost. Against all odds, his mind was healing, and that was all he really cared about, at least with regards to that part of his recovery.

His leg, however, was something of a different story. The nurses here were giving him the best treatment he could ask for, but his leg didn’t seem to be healing well, and while they were all pleasant enough, they weren’t May. He missed her company, her simple but comforting honesty, he missed her intuition. He had never had to explain how he was feeling to May, she understood him even when the words were too difficult to speak. He was starting to bottle up his emotions again now, could feel the stress and strain of doing so building up. As far as his leg went though, even so many weeks after the initial injury, the doctors were still waiting for it to heal more fully before any extra physical therapy could begin. What little he did undertake, however, soon became his own personal form of hell. Though not so bad as his (still somewhat blurred and indistinct) memories of war, it surely wasn’t too far removed. He certainly felt he was fighting a battle when it came to his walking.

One thing he did remember about himself, was that he’d never been one to understand his peers’ view that men had to be strong and show no weakness, but he thought he understood it all a little better as he struggled to walk, constantly stumbling and feeling his feet go out from underneath him in full view of a whole group people scrutinising his every move. Even the thought that the nurses and doctors were trained professionals hardly helped at all, but at least they were generally supportive, murmuring encouragement in a combination of English and French, though he barely spoke the latter. The staff here were made up of local medics and English and American nurses and doctors drafted into the war effort, and gradually transferred away from the Front as the Entente pushed on. He wasn’t sure how a medical facility functioned so well with such obvious language barriers, but it did. There were many different soldiers from the Entente at the facility, and the man in the bed to Fitz’s left was, he was fairly certain, a painter called Edouard who came from Nantes. If Fitz’s rudimentary French served him well enough, then Edouard had moved to Paris to pursue his craft, until the war, of course. He’d been in the medical facility for months now apparently, no longer able to draw or write, so bad were his own tremors and shakes, as well as the damage he'd sustained to both his legs too.

“Je ne peux pas dessiner depuis que j’ai commencé de battre,” he told Fitz sadly, thankfully taking Fitz’s half-garbled pidgin-French as the placation and source of comfort it was intended to be.

Fitz himself still had trouble keeping his night terrors and shaking at bay. Neurasthenia, they were calling it now. The first doctor to assess him at the centre had spoken about it as though it were a real illness, but, with the exception of Edouard, the men around him all spat out the word as though it were something to be ashamed of. Sometimes, as he flinched and fought the urge to seek cover at a nearby crash when a nurse dropped a tray or basin, or as he, or others around him, woke in the night with a loud scream dancing on their lips and a powerful urge to flee somewhere, anywhere, it was hard to fully understand - or accept - the lack of control he now had over himself.

There were only a few sources of respite from it all; now that he could hold a pencil more steadily, he was starting to draw again, handing over his line drawings for Edouard to scrutinise, trying to encourage the other man to learn again alongside him. He’d been persuading one of the bilingual nurses to help him improve his French on the sly, so that he could try and cheer his neighbour up a little more. He was making steps in persuading Edouard to start drawing again, though whether this was because of his persistence or because his French was improving slightly he wasn't sure. At the very least, his poor pronunciation amused the man, and Fitz was confident he’d have him holding pencil again within a week or two.                                                                        

When he didn’t sit and try draw and write, he often read. Sometimes outside, when the weather allowed. After his morning treatment and therapy, someone would help him outside with the use of a wheelchair, not that he much liked using one. He had initially resisted being wheeled around unless it was absolutely necessary, but had figured, eventually, that he was immobile either inside in his bed, or outside in the damn chair, and he knew which one he preferred. The priory was situated in amongst a beautiful valley, still green and bright under the late-summer sunshine. He enjoyed just being outside again, sitting amongst the trees and listening the rush of a nearby brook as he steadily worked his way through the hospital’s modest collection of books.

His only other source of relief came at night. Although the faces of soldiers whose names he couldn’t recall still haunted his sleep sometimes, his dreams were now much more frequently visited by a different ghost; the pale, pretty girl he’d seen as he left the hospital. It was a strange sort of joy to wake up with the memory of the dreams in which he saw her buzzing round his head. One dream was never quite like the other. Sometimes they were at the hospital, the setting in which he had first seen her, though sometimes he was standing, instead of lying on a stretcher. At other times the settings were more obscure to him, must have been fragments of his imagination; once he found himself in a small network of allotments all white under the cover of thick snow, the two of them huddled together around a fire, another time they walking through an old building complex, books tucked under their arms. The only thing the dreams had in common was that the girl never spoke, the silences between them always stretching as the dreams lead him, eventually, into deep and restful slumbers.

Perhaps the most vivid dream of all saw them sat down together in a park, sharing lunch. Her red chequered picnic rug was a patchwork void between them as they each occupied opposite sides, but in the heady heat of the imagined afternoon sun, he’d never felt closer to anyone. It was a strange sensation to wake up feeling so content in the company of person he’d never met, didn’t even know for sure existed. Sometimes, he wondered if he’d imagined her entirely, unconsciously keeping her image with him as a source of comfort as he recovered. He had been in a lot of pain after all, and heavily dosed up on pain relief for the journey. Somehow, though, he truly believed she was real, and, either way, she was real to him. He often found himself talking to her in his head, telling her about his day as though it were the most natural thing in the world. At other times he just wondered about her own day, her own reality of life there at Field Hospital 37A.

***

_15 th September, 1918  
_ _Soissons, France_

For the first time since she’d arrived at the hospital, she had a day off. They’d only been told a day in advance and as she’d curled up in bed that night she’d sighed and smiled to herself. She had absolutely no intention of rising until the sun was already well up, and had earmarked the day for writing letters to her family, as well as staring one of the books she hadn’t yet had time to get to.

The best laid plans did so often go to waste though and this one was no different. She was woken at the crack of dawn – the time she would have gotten up on any other day – to the sounds of a loud clatter and the smash of something falling from her bedside table.

“Oh my _God_!” The panicked voice that followed was unfamiliar, and located somewhere below Jemma.

Abruptly sitting up she found herself staring at an unknown woman who was crouched beside her bed, trying to pick up the shattered remnants of Jemma’s bedside lamp.

“Hey," she said with a sheepish smile but, disorientated and still half-asleep, it was all Jemma could do to blink confusedly at her. "I am so, _so_ sorry,” the woman went on, pulling herself up to standing with a hand on the table, and promptly knocking Jemma’s books and a fountain pen to the ground. She apologised again, and by the time she’d righted her mess (as much as was possible given all the broken glass on the floor) Jemma had abandoned all hope of getting any more sleep and had clambered out of bed, avoiding the glass and exchanging a puzzled look with Julia, who had also been woken up by the noise.

“Is everything alright?” Julia asked, and the girl nodded enthusiastically, loose curls bobbing around her shoulders.

“Yes, sorry. I just had a bit of an accident.” Julia caught her eye again, and Jemma bit back a smile. Her answer was less than illuminating.

Pressing the matter, Jemma went on, “that’s quite alright," she said, quickly dismissing the broken lamp. "It’s more that we just, well…sorry, not to be rude but, are you in the right place?”

“Well, yes, I hope so! They told me these were my new sleeping quarters. I’m a new volunteer, there’s two of us, actually. Skye,” she told them both quickly, words crashing into each other as she extended her hand out towards Jemma.

“Oh, well, hello Skye,” Jemma said, taking her hand and introducing herself. 

“I’m sorry I woke you guys" Skye went on, smiling brightly and looking over at Julia.

“Well I should unpack and change, I suppose. Apparently Matron’s waiting for us.”

There was little use in attempting to get back to sleep by the time that Skye and her companion, a red-headed, petite girl by the name of Harriet, had settled into the tent and changed into their uniforms and so both Jemma and Julia cleared up the tent a little and headed over to the mess tent for breakfast, both in slightly sour moods. It was hard to let an early start truly ruin a full day of rest, however, and the two women eventually settled happily into writing their letters and reading their books out in the weak rays of the September sun. It was perhaps the first time they’d really sat down and talked together personally too, about their homes and their families, about what drove them to join the VAD. Jemma skirted around the issue of Fitz, initially telling Julia only that she'd 'lost someone’ to the war. She’d quickly elucidated, however, following Julia’s question about whether he had been her husband, confirming she wasn’t, nor had ever been married.

Something in the question had her feeling strange though, had her contemplating, as she had at the train station bidding Fitz goodbye, the times her family had teased her that one day the two of them would get married.

There was little time to dwell, however, as she was shocked to hear Julia say,

“For me it was my brother. The loss, I mean. He was only eighteen, and I suppose I still can’t believe it. I joined immediately after we found out. I didn’t want to stick around at home after that. He was my twin brother, you see. We did everything together as children. I rather felt like I’d lost a bit of myself. I suppose now, slowly, I almost feel like I’m getting it back again.”

“I understand," she assured her eventually. “More than I can really express.”

***

If there had been any lingering resentment towards the two new volunteers, it passed quickly when they arrived back at the tent well after sundown, looking pale and worn out.

Jemma had almost forgotten hers and Julia’s first few days at the hospital, but quickly remembered all the tests Matron had set for them, thought she’d worked harder in those days than almost any other at the hospital.

“Who got beds and who got bandages?” Julia asked from the far corner of the room. She was curled up on her bed, dozing, and took the two new girls by surprise.

“Beds,” Harriet said eventually, bending down with a groan to take her shoes off.

“Bandages,” Skye added, voice muffled from where she heaved herself, without hesitation, onto the bed next to Jemma's, facedown, head in the pillows.

“Welcome to the VAD,” Julia said sarcastically, and Jemma chuckled.

“I had bandages the first day too,” Jemma told Skye after a moment. “Don’t worry, you’ll never have to do that many in one ago alone ever again, I swear.”

Even in spite of the day she’d had, Skye laughed, turning her head to look at Jemma. “That’s okay then, I can handle it so long as it’s just the one time. In fact, I was better at that than I was at the beds. My sheets were all wonky, I don’t know how you get them all straight perfect like that.” She pointed at Jemma’s own bed, on which the sheets were arranged impeccably.

“Well try it now, on your own bed before you go to sleep. I’ll help you,” Jemma said brightly. Skye looked surprised.

“Wh – really? Thanks!” she seemed genuinely surprised, hopping off the bed and untucking all the sheets and blankets from the sides, mussing them up until the bed needed making again.

“It’s no problem,” Jemma insisted and Skye smiled again. After a conspiratorial look at the tent’s entrance (though, if there were anyone lurking outside, there would be no way of telling), Skye leaned over to her, lowering her voice.

“We just thought, you know, no one would be at all kind to us after, well, _you know_.” Over her shoulder, Harriet nodded earnestly, but Skye didn’t seem too keen to go on.

Jemma glanced between the two girls, shaking her head to indicate that she didn’t understand.

“I mean, I’m sure May’s fine somewhere under the scary exterior but well _others_ weren’t quite so…”

“Oh, you mean Matron?” Julia supplied in a sudden moment of realisation. “Yes, she’s _beastly_ isn’t she?”

For a second, Jemma gaped, shocked to hear Julia speaking like that, but it was hard to find any redeeming features of Matron, and in a second, all four of them were laughing together. After Jemma had shown Skye the proper technique for making beds in an attempt to spare her from Matron’s wrath, the four got ready for bed, before sitting up for a little while talking. In particular, Julia and Jemma filled in the Americans on some of the more intimidating things Matron had done or said in front of them.

“But there _are_ ways to win her round too, I suppose,” Julia pointed out reasonably, adjusting the collar of her nightgown.

“Are they washing millions of bandages and making beds in five seconds flat?” Skye deadpanned.

Julia paused for a second, mouth twitching as she tried to think of something else.

“Maybe, yeah.”

They all laughed again, completely forgetting themselves until a senior nurse appeared at their tent a few minutes later, hissing angry curses and threatening merry hell if their lights weren’t out and their voices hushed before she got back to her tent.

***

Within no time at all, the new volunteers, but Skye especially, somehow, became her friends. Jemma privately thought that she and Skye couldn’t be more different if they tried, yet somehow they worked well together. She and Julia hadn’t been specifically charged with looking after the new volunteers, but found themselves going out of their way to help them settle in, often giving them additional instructions and supervision when they could. After Matron’s initial period of scrutiny, Jemma found herself watching the two younger girls and as such, was careful to encourage them well, and not to be too harsh about their mistakes. She’d always thought motivation worked better than pressure, after all, and the girls seemed to appreciate that.

After the night which had seen Jemma open up to May about Fitz, things at the hospital had slowly quietened down. The Entente's troops marched on from their position on the Aisne to push the German army back further and so new admissions became scarcer and scarcer. A fortnight later and they were focussed mainly on the ongoing care of the men who’d arrived on that night, and as such Jemma had found herself in her most preferred situation, having enough time to treat all the men slowly and properly, without the pressure to hurry from bed to bed with no time to stop and talk to each patient individually.

She’d found herself in the habit of visiting Triplett last so that the two could talk for as long as they desired, a habit they’d fallen into easily. They often spoke in depth, Trip – as he insisted she call him – was easy to talk to, he spoke and smiled easily and was the sort of person who listened with his whole body. He would nod his head in time with her words, lips pursed, neck tilted in her direction. He gave himself over so wholly, so willingly, in conversation and had a powerful way of making every person he spoke to feel as though their words truly mattered. He’d taken, in fact, to wandering around the ward in the afternoons, between the nurses’ rotations, speaking to men who never had visitors or letters, listening to their stories in that same full, giving way.

He was also the only one who knew about Fitz, other than May of course. She’d never mentioned him by name, but she’d told him, in great depth, about their friendship, admitted how much she still missed him and how empty she felt without him.

“But is it a bearable kind of empty now, right?” he’d asked once. “Does it feel more like you’ve hollowed out a space to kind of keep him in now? Or is it still a bad kind of empty? Like it’s eating you from in the inside outwards?”

She’d been forced to admit she didn’t know, hadn’t even considered there could be a ‘good kind’ of empty. Yet she’d dwelled on that question afterwards, had thought about it as she blew her lantern out last thing at night, the echoes of Skye’s jokes and Julia’s laughter in her ears, the ghost of a happy smile still on her face. None of the people she spent her days with were Fitz, but they  _were_ her new friends, and she'd slowly stopped comparing everything they did or said to Fitz. 

One day soon after the initial question, she'd walked over to Trip's bed, announcing decisively,

“I’ve decided,” as she settling herself down in the chair beside his bed without further introduction. He'd been reading and elected to finish his page first, and sighed as he deliberately took extra time, keeping her waiting on purpose before he eventually snapped the book shut.

 “Hello to you too, Jemma” he joked, grinning at her, tossing the book to the end of his bed. "What have you decided?"

 “Simmons,” she corrected, more out of habit than conviction. “And, I’ve decided that it _is_ a bearable kind of empty now.”

 To his credit, it took him only a moment to understand what she was saying and when he looked at her, he looked so genuinely happy that it knocked her off guard for a second.

She picked up the conversation again a moment later, asking about his arm, and getting ready examine it and change his dressings when a senior nurse came over. Jemma noticed Skye hovering across the other side of the ward, waiting for instructions. 

“Matron wanted her to get some experience with dressings and bandages,” the nurse said, jerking her head at Skye. “If you’ve not changed Private Triplett’s already, can you supervise her now?”

Jemma nodded and smiled. “Of course.” She excused herself and walked over to Skye, finding the other girl paler than normal. She was biting at her bottom lip, her brow furrowed almost as though she was nervous.

“Have you changed bandages before?” she asked gently, and Skye shook her head.

“At least, not on someone with a real injury.”

“It’s fine, really, there’s nothing to worry about, so long as you take your time. I was nervous about it too at first.”

“I just don’t want to hurt anyone.”  

Jemma talked her through checking over a patient’s notes to gauge the nature of their injuries, and encouraged her to speak to patients themselves, to ask them how they were feeling and if they’d noticed any improvements or deteriorations in themselves. She had no doubt in Skye’s bedside manner, but was concerned to see the way she fiddled with her sleeves, obviously trying to dispel any nervous energy.

Acting on instinct, and remembering all too vividly how it felt to be scared and overwhelmed, she took Skye’s hand in her own, and smiled to see how hard she was trying (and failing) to keep her hands from shaking. She drew her gently through the tent, and across the length of Ward A, tracing the now-familiar path over to Trip’s bed.

“This is Private Triplett,” she told Skye, hoping her tone was encouraging. “Trip this is a new volunteer, Skye. She’s going to change your dressings while I help out. She’s never done this for real before though, so be gentle with her,” she smiled and Trip gave an appreciative chuckle at her choice of words.

“I will with her if she is with me,” he quipped back and as he did so Jemma glanced over at Skye, whose eyes were as no less uncertain but, Jemma noted, there was a steel to them now, a determination and a strength that made Jemma wonder how many times she’d had to square her shoulders and make the best of things in the past. She’d kept her background remarkably quiet when the four of them had spoken about their homes, but Jemma hadn’t wanted to push. If she wanted to speak about it, she would eventually.

Gently encouraging her forward, Jemma watched as Skye smiled bracingly down at Trip, hands rather less shaky now as she gently undid the bandages around his arm.

“Tell me if I hurt you,” she muttered quietly, eyes darting between her hands and Triplett’s face.

Trip, however, simply grinned his relaxed, lopsided grin up at Skye, a confident, easy-going smirk that turned slowly into a pensive, appreciative smile as his eyes roved Skye’s pretty face. Taking a step back to watch Skye’s work, Jemma rolled her eyes to herself.

“So, you’re American too, huh?” he asked and Skye nodded, teeth still worrying her bottom lip as she worked. “Where from?”

“Chicago,” she replied as she dropped the sullied bandages into a basin beside the bed. Jemma retreated slightly and allowed Skye to work. It was clear that training was beginning to kick in, and so Jemma hovered, just out of earshot, watching her closely, silently thanking Trip for knowing she needed to be put at ease.

Jemma smiled. Skye was a natural.

“I know what you guys did back there,” Skye told her later, grinning at her and hooking her arm through Jemma’s as they made their way to the mess hall, where they’d all try and convince themselves they were enjoying whatever terrible food awaited them that night, and they’d laugh and chat with the other volunteers and some of the younger, friendlier nurses, just as they did every night after another day of work.

Jemma just shook her head however, insisting that Skye had done it all by herself. 

***

Weeks bled on into one another that way, as Skye and Harriet got more confident in their duties and the four girls grew even closer, and the gradual drop in temperature brought with it rumours about an armistice, and the end of the war. That all meant little to the staff at Field Hospital 37A though; there was always a never ending stream of soldiers to treat.


	8. 7. Let Me Know The Way

_20 th October, 1918  
_ _Wrenbar Home of Recovery, France_

_‘…In short, I’m doing well. I really can’t say I’m confident my walking will ever be that strong again, but my leg has finally healed enough that I’ve begun more physical therapy and I’m hopeful things will work out. I’m remembering a lot more now, lots more familiar faces, even if I’m still struggling with names at the moment. And, what’s more, I now know my strange draw to the letter ‘J’ all those weeks ago seemed to be completely off base! I’m hopeful they’ll have found my papers soon, then perhaps I can move to a treatment centre closer to home and start getting things back in order. I’m confident that my recovery has everything to do with the treatment I received from yourself and the other nurses at the hospital, and for that, I’m more grateful than I can express._

_Thank you for everything,_

_Fitz.’_

He looked down at the completed letter as he replaced the lid of the fountain pen he’d borrowed from Edouard. He was finally confident enough that his writing was as neat and steady as it would ever be and had decided it was time to write back to the hospital he’d left. May had written to him once, and told him to keep her updated, had mentioned that she’d be happy to one day reader a letter in which he could tell her his name, and he hoped he’d be able to give her a pleasant surprise with the one he had just finished.

Quietly motioning at Edouard to his right, Fitz handed back his pen with a hushed whisper of thanks, as he strove to avoid disturbing the man in the bed to his left.

“Comment va-t-il?” Edouard murmured back, nodding at Fitz’s other, much sicker neighbour.

“Je ne sais pas,” Fitz whispered, glancing at the man. None of the men in the ward had been told much about Barker’s condition, they only knew that he’d taken a turn for the worse so suddenly it was terrifying. Only a day ago he’d been sat up talking to Fitz and the other men, now he was on his back, drifting in and out consciousness, consumed by fever.

Walt Barker had only arrived a week ago with a leg injury similar to Fitz’s, except his had become infected. He’d been taking it all in his stride though, and keeping his spirits up as best he could. He had been at his brightest in the few days previously, the treatments and painkillers had seemed to be working. The first sign of trouble, however, had come when he refused to touch his evening meal the night before, wanting only to curl up onto his side and go to sleep.

Even as Fitz watched the erratic rise and fall of Barker’s chest, a group of nurses and a doctor marched into check on him, coaxing him out of his slumber as they did so. Their examinations seemed to take much longer than normal, and when they were done, they brought forward a stretcher Fitz hadn’t initially noticed.

“W-where are you taking me?” Barker asked as they prepared to move him out of his bed. “No, no you’re taking me to the Other Rooms aren't you? No I’m not going, I don’t want to go. _I’m not dying._ ”

“Of course not Private," one nurse had whispered, bent over him with her hand on his forehead, doing her best to calm him down. "We’re just taking you for an x-ray or two."

There was a rumour shared around by many of the men that facilities such as this one had ‘death rooms’ in them, places where men who were thought to be close to dying were taken, though no one was quite clear if there was some special reason for this, or whether it was simply to allow the dying some privacy and remove the burden of an unwanted vigil from the living. Fitz himself had never been sure if it was true. At Barker’s outburst, however, the attention of the room had come to rest of what was happening to him, and many men who _did_ believe in the rooms were soon shouting out on Walter’s behalf.

“Don’t you dare take him off there!” came the accented cry from Bathany, the man to the right of Edouard.

“Don’t let them take you, Walt!” another voice piped up from across the room. It came from the man in the corner furthest from Fitz’s bed, a soldier who was perhaps most affected by neurasthenia and night terrors of them all. He frequently woke them all up in the dead of night, shouting in his sleep about the Other Rooms and being left to die in the dark.

“Nurse, you’re not actually going to take him anywhere like that are you?” Fitz asked quietly as they carried Barker past.

“Just an x-ray or two,” the nurse repeated, but there was no real conviction in her voice. Hoping to help the other man, Fitz smiled bracingly at him.

“You hear that? Just an x-ray. We’ll be seeing you in a bit.” He hoped he’d managed to fill his voice with some confidence, but he felt a terrible thrill of fear as he heard Edouard whisper sadly to himself,

“Il ne reviendra pas.”

_He won’t be coming back._

The words hit Fitz like a fist to his stomach, but, eventually, Edouard was proved right. Barker did not return. Instead, a day later, a nurse came in with a handful of fresh linens and put them on Barker's bed.

From the way the sound of the rustling of sheets filled the ward that night, Fitz very much doubted if anyone had gotten any sleep after that.

***

It felt as though Barker had been gone no time at all Fitz returned from a morning session of physical therapy to find that Barker’s old station was about to be occupied again, much to the obvious displeasure of some of the other men nearby. Since he'd died there’d been a feeling amongst some of the soldiers that more could have been done to help Barker, rather than just simply hiding him away, but having been in the closest proximity to the man, Fitz wasn’t so sure. He had, of course, kept that opinion to himself.

“What’s happening? Fitz asked Edouard as the therapist helped him back to his bed. He could just about manage to get around now, with support from someone else or a cane or stick, not that he much liked using any of those options, especially the latter two. “New patients?”

Edouard nodded. “ _Oui, deux. Américains_. I think, anyway.”

They watched the new men get settled, one beside Fitz and one on the other side of the room, the nurses asking them questions as read over their notes and drug cards before helping them to unpack.

Fitz's attention was immediately drawn even more closely to the man beside him by his responses to questions about the field hospital where he’d initially been treated.

“Excuse me, did you say you’d come from 37A?” Fitz asked once the nurse had departed and left the new man alone, watching tentatively as the stranger stared down the English soldiers occupying the two beds opposite, who were eyeing the new arrival with suspicion and distaste.

One went to open his mouth to say something which no doubt have been curt and unnecessary when Fitz headed him off, already sure what they were about to say to the man, and having no interest in their attitude regarding something of so little importance.

 “The man’s just arrived here, leave it out, alright?”

He suspected the silence that followed had more to do with the other men’s shock at Fitz’s outburst than any real fear of reprisal from him, but either way, it did the trick and they settled back into their own conversation

 “Thanks,” the other man said, somewhat surprised. “But I've sort of got this by now, you know? Kinda used to it,” he added, though not ungratefully, good hand rubbing at the back of his neck.

“I know, that one was on me,” Fitz shrugged and the man half-smiled at him. “Did you say you were at 37A?” Fitz asked again.

“Yeah, was drafted in to help you guys push the Germans all the way back out of the Aisne. We did it in the end but it was a bad one,” he said with a grimace. “Think I was lucky to get away with only my arm busted. Were you stationed out there too?”

“I was at the hospital there, a few months ago now, same mission but a few tries earlier. I about remember going over the top but no idea what happened next. Must have taken a blow to the head, but next thing I woke up in the hospital with my leg in bits and no real memory of, well, anything at all.”

This seemed to shock the other man, who was keen to know if he really meant _all_ his memories. He tutted sympathetically when Fitz confirmed he hadn’t even known who he was.

“Man, that’s a tough go of it. You doing okay now though, yeah?” the man asked. “Know who you are?” he asked, tone slightly teasing.

Fitz bit back the temptation to try out an existential joke and simply nodded instead. “It’s getting there I suppose. What exactly happened to your arm?”

“Bit of shrapnel,” Trip explained with a disinterested, casual shrug of his good shoulder. “Same story as almost everyone else really. Got hit unexpectedly, my arm got sliced right through. Had no idea how bad it was until later, at the time I was focussed on going back in for a buddy of mine. There was time to worry about my arm once I knew he was alive.”

Fitz nodded, impressed. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever have been able to do something like that, had no idea really how he had ever coped in battle.

“I’m Antoine Triplett, by the way,” the other man added suddenly. “But I prefer going by Trip. I’d shake your hand but, you know,” he joked as he looked down at his arm, wiggled his fingers a little.

Fitz laughed, introducing himself, and asked if the doctors thought Trip get any use of his arm again.

“They think there’s room for a bit of improvement, that’s why they decided to send me here. They’ve got a better chance of getting good results, apparently. Honestly, I’ve got no idea how they saved it in the first place but I’m glad they did.”

Fitz nodded quickly.

“They did a good job for me too, one nurse in particular. May, did she treat you?”

Trip nodded. “I saw her from time to time, she definitely seemed to have everything under control. No I think I was a bit of an easier case, maybe,” Trip laughed quietly.

Fitz liked his laugh, liked the way Trip always seemed so positive, and the way he seemed to listen intently to every thing you had to sad.

“No I mostly got visits from the volunteers, though one in particular was knowledgeable enough to be a nurse, perhaps even a doctor. She was a university student, before all this,” he motioned around the room and Fitz knew to take that to mean ‘the war’. He’d observed in his time as soldier, that the gesture of spreading one’s arms over any scene of destruction, injury, or death had become universal code for ‘the war’, provided perhaps an easier way to communicate a word that seemed taboo now, a word that no one seemed willing to say.

“Don’t suppose you knew any of them?” Trip went on, oblivious.

“No, their volunteers had all moved on to even busier hospitals when I was there, they’d been waiting for some to arrive. I think some did arrive the day I left mind you,” he said, the face of the girl he’d glimpsed from across the hospital site now at the front of his mind.

“Shame. They were nice people, all of them, Made friends two of them in particular. One wanted me to write to write to her when I got here.” 

Fitz nodded, telling him about his own letter. “They might get sent together if you write it before the afternoon post delivery,” he warned him, and Trip nodded his understanding, smiling gratefully, digging into his bag for a pen and paper. Fitz watched as he began writing, pausing every so often to think.

After a long pause having written nothing, the other man turned to Fitz.

“Do you guys have anywhere else you go other than here?” he asked, dropping his voice slightly, and Fitz told him about his spot outside.

“Can you show me?” 

 “I can direct you,” Fitz said awkwardly, not keen on the idea of setting a snail’s pace for Trip to have to follow out to the gardens. He could get there without the use of a wheelchair now, but it was slow going. “I’m not exactly that mobile.”

Trip half-snorted.

“Doesn’t matter man. I’ll give you a hand,” he lifted up his left palm, looking pointedly at his right.

Fitz hesitated for a minute, but he’d really rather be anywhere but inside, so he nodded and, with Trip’s help, they slowly made their way outside. The recovery centre was a strange mix of hospital and home, and the men who were well enough were free to come and go as they pleased, within reason of course, and so no one bothered with them as they passed by, nodding greetings at other patients going in the opposite direction. They all occupied other wards, and Fitz had never seen any of them before. Generally, the men were split into groups based on the nature of their injury and of their treatment, meaning that Fitz most often spent time with people like himself and Trip; with severe injuries to limbs which caused some form of difficulty in mobility. It was only occasionally that he really saw the wide range of injuries and effects this war had caused.

“It’s strange back in that ward,” Trip said as they finally made it outside and came to a stop in Fitz’s normal spot. Fitz nodded. “Men all just sitting around staring at nothing, I don’t like to think about what they might be seeing,” he admitted, gingerly bracing himself against the branch of an old oak as he lowered himself to the ground.

“It’s as quiet as the grave half the time, and that makes it even harder,” Fitz added, “some days you can barely even hear yourself think over all the nothing.”

 Trip just nodded, settling himself down on the ground, once he was sure Fitz was situated safely and comfortably. He pulled the paper and pen from his back jacket pocket, awkwardly picking up the pen in his left hand. 

 “You’re right-handed?” Fitz guessed as he watched him struggle, and Trip nodded, heaving out a frustrated sigh. "I’ve spent ages trying to train this hand to write,” he grumbled, “and it’s still pretty terrible.”

“Well, I’ve got a bad leg and you’ve got a bad arm. You helped me walk, seems a fair deal,” Fitz pointed out, holding his hand out for Trip’s pen and paper. “Fair warning though, my handwriting’s terrible, and I still shake a little occasionally. Grinning, Trip gratefully handed over his things, telling Fitz to address the letter to someone called Skye, dictating his message about his journey and describing the home. 

Fitz enjoyed his afternoon, sat out beside Trip, writing as carefully as possible as Trip spoke slowly and deliberately, the two of them watching the pale yellow disc of the autumn sun as it journeyed slowly across the sky, it’s thin beams of light trying feebly to reach between a heavy tapestry of pale grey clouds.

As Trip concluded his letter, he added one last detail. “Can you add a postscript?” he asked, “and tell her to say ‘hello’ to Jemma for me?”

Fitz paused for a second at that, mind stalling for a second over something he couldn’t quite process. He shook his head slightly. With his memories all in flux so often now, it was hardly a strange occurrence to him. Whatever string Trip’s words had pulled, maybe it would come loose soon.

“Sure.”

***

That night the strange girl from the hospital visited his dreams again, only this time, for the first time, she spoke to him. He couldn’t hear her what she was saying though, over the sudden pounding in his head, as he drifted into a more lucid sleep and slowly a crushing realisation hit him, hard.

All those dreams, all those scenarios and all the feelings he’d thought were imaginary sources of comfort were nothing of the kind after all. They weren’t invented, they weren’t dreams or fantasies, they were _memories_.

They were memories of someone he should never have forgotten, someone who’d shaped his whole life, so he was coming to realise. Someone who was built into the very foundations of the things that made him who he was, things he was only just reencountering now, for the first time.

But, then, maybe he hadn’t ever really forgotten her, the pull of emotion, the strange flare of love and affection he’d always felt upon waking from dreams filled with her felt all too real as he gradually surfaced from sleep, shaking and sweating, for the first time, over something that didn’t involve bombs and death and war, with only one thing on his mind and one word on his lips;

“Jemma.”


	9. 8. Don’t Keep Me Waiting Here

_24 th October, 1918  
_ _Soissons, France_

She made her way across the complex, weaving in amongst the rush of men unloading the one of weekly deliveries. She’d been intending to help unload and pack everything away, but had been summoned unexpectedly by Matron, who’d spoken cryptically to her about the rumours of an armistice, eventually drawing breath and handing her a large sealed envelope.

“You’re going to need this, the papers will clear everything up. But please pay a visit to Sister May before reading them, she’ll explain what’s going on. She’s in the mess hall, waiting for you. And Simmons? Thank you. For all your work here.”

As she approached May’s table in the corner of the mess hall a few minutes later, still puzzled about her strange meeting with Matron, Jemma found the other woman engrossed in a letter, an absent smile etched into her face.

It was so nice to see May so happy, and Jemma forgot herself for a moment as she approached.

“Good news, Sister May?” she asked, without thinking.

May glanced up, and if Jemma didn’t know better she’d have said she’d taken her by surprise. But she _did_ know better, of course. It was close to impossible to sneak up on Sister May.                                                        

“Yes,” she replied, “yes, somewhat unexpected, but good news all the same.” She motioned that Jemma should sit down. May waved the papers in her hand absently. “It’s a letter from an old patient. He was brought in without his identification cards or tag, and woke up with hardly any of his memories. He spent his entire time under my care in a lot of pain from an injured leg, and with no real idea of who he was, but he was a nice boy, a good patient, and a good man. In fact, he left just as you arrived, or I’d have wagered that he’d have enjoyed having you read to him or speak with him as you do for the others. I think he was just scared, and a bit lonely,” she said.

Jemma had a vague recollection of seeing men being loaded onto a truck to be taken to a better-equipped recovery facility, wondering if May’s patient was one of them.

“Was he here long?”

“Yes, a good while. Too long, really. We weren’t equipped for the kind of care he needed, his memory loss, his leg, his tremors and neurasthenia, he could have done with being sent away earlier, but you know how quickly these things must be arranged.”

“But he was sent to a Recovery Home eventually?” she asked, “like Private Triplett?” she added with a little twinge of sadness. It had been hard not to be selfish and wish for their friend to stay when they’d had to suddenly and unexpectedly bid him goodbye just under a week earlier. But it was for the best. She suspected that of all of them Skye had missed him the most. She'd watched something blossom, slowly and unassumingly, between the two of them and had been happy to see Skye receive a letter from him earlier that morning, had watched her smile, relieved to know he was safe. 

Across from her, May nodded.

“The same one, if I’m not mistaken. As he left, I told him I one day hoped to receive a letter from him, one written in his own hand and with his own name signed at the bottom. And today, I did.” May smiled again at this, fingers drifting over the pages as she folded the letter neatly and put it back in its envelope.

It occurred to Jemma that this, here, was truly the point of what she and May, and all the people like them, did. She found herself smiling at the idea that the care and treatment that came out of these places could have an impact and could do some good. That was what she had wanted in the first place, after all. And it was nice to see May happy, too – this case seemed as though it was particularly close to her heart.

“But this brings me, quite neatly, to the order of the day,” May went on, tone heavy again and it made Jemma’s stomach suddenly squeeze. She had the sudden feeling that she would not like what May was about to say.

“Am I in trouble, Sister?” she asked.

“No, of course not, nothing of the sort,” May insisted. She took in rushed breath, before saying quickly, “you’re going to be transferred.” May’s face flickered for a moment, her usual impassive, unreadable expression replaced for a split second with a look of regret. Jemma’s heart sank. This was the last thing she’d expected to be called in for.

“I – what?” she blurted out, forgetting her manners. “I – my apologies, Sister,” she added, trying to collect herself. “You mean to say I’m being asked to leave?”

May paused for a moment.

“In a very particular sense, yes.”

“Have I done something wrong? Is there a problem?” she asked, firing off quickly into a long list of questions, never waiting for a response. “If it’s something I can correct then I assure you Sister I will, I – ”

May held up her hand for silence and Jemma trailed off.

“You’ve done nothing but excellent work here, but peace will soon be upon us.” Jemma opened her mouth to argue but May cut her off with a look. “I know, we’ve all heard it so many times before, but we have it on rather good authority this time. The German army is on its last legs, with the last influx of American soldiers to join the fighting recently, we are making good progress. This time, it truly _is_ a matter of when, not if.”

This news, though it should have been a happy thought, suddenly made her feel cold and clammy. Though there had been times when Jemma had been painfully homesick, most recently when she opened a small package of letters, new books, and a few hand-crafted gifts from her family on her birthday a month ago, she found she could not imagine going home just yet, was not ready in the slightest to return to England.

For so long, the end of the war had been distant, a far-off concept, and although it held the promise of a normal life again, it also brought the threat of the mundane, of returning to London and trying to live her pre-war life, only entirely without Fitz, and the promise of future with him, this time. She’d come a long way since the days she’d struggle to get out of bed, so painful was the grief she felt at his death, or the times she’d imagine she saw him, standing in his army uniform, rifle slung over his shoulder, covered from head to toe in muck and grime and blood, calling to her, but she wasn’t ready to go home again just yet, no matter how much she missed her family.

“So am I to end my service now?”

May watched her for a moment, studying her face, leaving Jemma feeling as though she were under one of the microscopes she used for her experiments.

Eventually, May began speaking again.

“If you want to, you may leave, yes. But I took a few liberties, assuming you might be interested in a posting at a recovery home? They could use your skills and your knowledge, and they’re so frequently understaffed anything you could do to help would be gratefully received. Plus you have a way of talking to the men, a way of making them feel cared for, I thought such a posting might suit you. If I was wrong to assume that you wouldn't rather go home, then I apologise,” she said gravely, but Jemma suspected that May already knew she was right. She was acutely perceptive, almost scarily so.  

There was no need for further consideration, and Jemma accepted immediately.

“Good,” May said as though she'd never expected anything different, the corners of her mouth twitching up into a smile. “The envelope contains papers about the sorts of duties you’ll be expected to complete, there will be a small amount of training, but mostly you’ll be expected to learn as you work.” May rose, and Jemma mirrored her actions. “You’ll have to excuse me, Simmons. My break is over. Take some time to read over that information. If you don’t wish to change your mind, the next convoy will leave in three days.”

*** 

“If you cry, I’m going to cry too, so don’t you dare,” Jemma joked, her voice thick as she embraced Skye, whose bottom lip was trembling dangerously. “Look after yourself, won’t you?” Skye nodded against her as she held on tightly for much longer than was strictly necessary. Jemma didn’t mind though, found she didn’t much want to let go either. When they did part, Skye swiped at a tear that had crept down her cheek.

“I will. And you must write to me, both of you,” she added as Julia followed behind Jemma, allowing Skye to throw her arms around her and pull her into a hug too. Julia would be leaving with Jemma, but she would be going home, having accepted a position at a recovery centre in the south of England so as to be closer to her family. She was as ready to go back to home as Jemma was hesitant to leave France, and Jemma felt it was fitting that she and Julia were ending their time at 37A in the same way they’d begun it; together. Granted, by now, they were much firmer friends, much better acquainted with each other, much less fearful of what the future held for them.

May had already warned them both to expect life at a recovery home to be much removed from life at a field hospital.

“It’ll be no less gruelling simply because you’re away from the Front,” she cautioned them. “Long-term care is just as tough, and sometimes worse. It’s far easier to get attached to patients, far harder to stand the sight of the truly gruelling nature of long-term therapy and treatment, especially for those patients who cannot take to it. You must practice as much, if not more detachment than you already practice here.” A lifetime ago, her words would have terrified Jemma, would have left her heart racing and her mind questioning her own abilities. This time, she merely threw her bags onto the back of an army wagon with her jaw set and a firm belief in herself, content in the knowledge that she would do what was necessary. Nursing was something she’d fallen naturally into doing, and it wasn’t something she was ready to fall away from now, no matter how challenging it proved to be. She wasn't about to give up on herself now. 

May was there to see them off too, standing, silent as ever, at Skye’s shoulder, in spite of the fact that it was before sunrise, and she had an assigned day of rest today.

She surprised Jemma by wordlessly embracing her. Jemma clung onto her for the briefest of moments, suddenly overcome with emotion. May had been with her throughout her time at the hospital, and she was convinced that she would not have coped half so well without her.

Before they parted, May whispered into her ear, so quietly that she almost missed it.

“You’ve done so well, you should to be proud of yourself, because I know I am very proud of  _you_.” The hitch in her voice brought tears back to Jemma's eyes.

As May bid goodbye to Julia, Jemma hopped up into the truck before she decided to turn around and stay. Julia joined her a moment later, dropping her bag next to Jemma’s.

“I had thought that if I never sat in another one of these, it would be too soon,” Julia joked and Jemma laughed, nodding her agreement as the engine coughed into life and the truck began rattling and shaking in a way that was far too familiar by now. They waved at the three figures they left behind, standing and staring at the field hospital until it was just a smudge on the horizon behind them, both of them blinking away a few tears as they sat down beside each other. 

***

In the end, the second journey on board the army truck was far worse than the first, if only because the autumn weather was beginning to fade to winter by now. Its only saving grace, for Jemma at least, was that her journey to the next hospital was much shorter than Julia’s trip back to in Boulogne-sur-Mer. By the time she arrived, a whole day of driving later, they’d been caught in no less than three separate downpours, and were both damp and shivery, the canvas atop the truck doing only so much to protect them from the elements.

At least her new home was set into a beautiful green valley and, even though the surrounding trees were losing their leaves and the bright summer flowers had all but died off, it was hard not to appreciate how beautiful the place was, the building itself constructed out of fine, old grey stone. Even under the current rainfall, she couldn’t help but think that this was exactly the type of peaceful place that would help people recover from the horrors of war.

She bid a sad goodbye to Julia, happily accepting a slip of paper with the address of her family home on it, promising she would write, and that she would visit whenever it was that she returned to England, but did not stop to watch the truck drift off into the distance, as Skye, May and Harriet had done for them, choosing instead to make a quick run into the building, bags held over her head.

She was met in the reception room by a stout, greying woman who spoke with a French accent. Before Jemma had time to think, the nurse had pushed a few papers under her nose (which Jemma signed accordingly) and had led her off to the nurses' sleeping quarters, explaining that the home was a centre for all Entente forces who needed their help, before rattling off a long, practiced speech about codes of conduct. The rules here were no different from the rules at the field hospital, however, and Jemma tuned out most of what she said as she took in the sights of the main hospital building, even as it lay, dimly-lit and almost silent due to the late hour. 

She felt a small thrill of excitement at she passed through the place. The field hospital had functioned well, had maintained a form of order in the face of great chaos, but this place was different. It was clear that this home ran like a machine, she thought, as she passed boards with detailed rotas pinned to them, read the plaques that hung above every single room in the building, listened to the nurse explain that their main three focusses in the centre were understanding neurasthenia and emotional disturbance, attempting to provide physical therapy for men with limited use of the limbs, and helping amputees to cope with their condition. In fact, as she was left alone in her new room with instructions to be back in the reception room by six o’clock the next morning, she found herself oddly excited to get started with this new work.

***

_25 th October, 1918  
_ _Wrenbar Home of Recovery, France_

He had been beside himself since he’d woken up in the middle of the night with memories buzzing through his head and blood rushing round his head as his heart beat out of his chest.

Trip had woken up to the sound of his cries, and had been there to listen as Fitz explained, in a hushed whisper, what had happened.

“You think it was the Jemma I knew? Simmons?” Trip had whispered back, eyes wide and shining in the tiny glimmer of moonlight that snuck between the curtains by his bed.

“How can it be anyone else? I _saw_ her there Trip, I just didn’t know it was her. But I was drawn to her, somewhere deep down I must have recognised her!"

 Trip whistled through his teeth quietly. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I…I don’t know,” Fitz said, panicked, “I don’t know if she knows I’m alive, she probably thinks I’m missing, or worse!” He’d been close to getting out of bed and demanding he be driven back to the old field hospital then and there.

 

Naturally, of course, that was not an option and he had known it, even panicked as he had been that night. The best that could be done was a letter, hastily written and explaining everything as best he could, but there was to be no post sent to the field hospital for a few days at best, and the route of the delivery meant it would take a few days for his letter to arrive, even once it did eventually leave Wrenbar.

This hadn’t stopped him from asking after the post deliveries multiple times a day since then, hoping and praying for a letter from Jemma.

However, by now, the nurses had started heading him off. 

“Nope, no post so far Fitz,” the nurse that came to take him for his morning physical therapy session said sadly, and, beside him, Trip gave a sympathetic little sigh.

He wasn’t surprised at all, but his heart still sank a little further as he sat himself down on his usual chair in his usual therapy room, waiting for the doctor and the nurses to arrive.

***

“You’re going to be observing physical therapy sessions this morning, learning what kind of treatment to give. It’s unique to each patient, of course, but you should get a good idea of our basic methods from some observation,” the nurse from last night told her the next morning. “You’ll be expected to report to room 6b as soon as possible. If you’ve already eaten, you’re welcome to go ahead early and wait inside for everyone to arrive.”

The nurse turned on her heel and left, and, thinking she should probably learn her way around the place a bit better, Jemma took the nurse’s advice. As it turned out, however, she found the room more easily than possible, and, after a moment’s hesitation about whether to wait outside or not, she turned the handle and pushed the door open.

The sight that met her as she opened the door made her feel as though her blood had frozen solid in her veins. He was sat half in profile, but even with only a portion of his face on show, she’d know him anywhere, even if she knew it wasn't possible that he was really sat there in front of her. 

Her head swam slightly, mind going slightly blank, and she was forced to steady herself against the doorframe to stop her legs from giving out beneath her.

“Fitz?” her voice came out as no more than a whisper, a stuttering, strangled sound as her throat slowly constricted, the weight of all the tears she’d shed over his death welling up within her. 

He whipped around at the sound of her voice, finding himself face to face with a person he’d never expected he’d ever see. For a moment as he blinked at her, shocked, his heart thudding suddenly in his chest.

“ _Jemma_?”

 

It didn’t seem real that she could actually be here, and at first he thought she must have received his letter and come straight to see him.

The timings just didn't match up, however, and the look on her face told a different story. As she stood there with tears spilling, unchecked, down her cheeks, she looked as though she’d seen a ghost, and he’d discover later that, in seeing him sitting there after months of believing him to be dead, she more or less _had._

 

She didn’t even register that she’d moved until she found herself pressed up against him, arms around his shoulders, and it took her a moment to realise she was crying into his shoulder, but he had his arms wrapped around her, and there was a dampness to the place where his face met her neck, and none of that really mattered anyway because this had to be a dream. This wasn't real. She was going to wake up in her bed at the hospital in a moment, crying into her pillow, and he'd be gone from her again. 

Because Fitz was gone. She'd spent months willing life back into the dead to no avail, why should it be different now?

Fitz was dead. The letter had said so. She’d spent months grieving, spent months trying to get her life back in order and _no_ _this simply wasn’t possible._ It was the best kind of impossibility, but that's all it was. 

 

Those were the only words that she could find in her whole vocabulary and she found herself repeating them over and over again in her head, until she must have said them out loud between sobs, because he’d suddenly pulled away from her slightly, staring down at her with red-rimmed eyes, and said,

“Yes, it is.”

 

In the end, they must have presented quite the sight to the doctor and nurse that arrived a little while later, but they both had bigger things on their minds.

***

In spite of the momentous nature of what had happened, in spite of being so suddenly and unexpectedly reunited,  it still took a surprising amount of time before all the details became clear to them.

They'd spent time trying to work it all out together, but hadn't come any closer to the truth, had stopped caring after the second day of trying to riddle it all out between them. The importance of finding out why she'd been given misinformation about Fitz's death, and why Fitz never did have any identifying features on his person paling into insignificance in light of the bigger picture. They still wanted answers, of course, but the urgency they felt in the first few days waned into simple curiosity and a gently need for eventual closure. 

A few days later and Fitz’s files finally arrived, though they were less than useless now, given that Jemma could supply every missing detail they’d needed; his date of birth, home address and everything in between.

A week after that, an army official stopped by to talk to them about the error, vowing to look into what had happened.

By the time, the memory of Hans Müller returned him a short while later, the _whys_ and _hows_ of the matter could finally be put behind them, and the focus could return to the things that mattered to them; the relief and the joy and the overwhelming force of emotion all tied up in an outcome neither of them had ever truly expected.

Letters were sent to their families, their individual stories of war shared with each other, as much Fitz's memory permitted, around the warm orange glow of the lamp on Fitz’s bedside table. 

For Fitz, it was like finding and falling in love with his best friend over again. When he'd first remembered Jemma, he had been confused. Everything he felt for her seemed jumbled up in his memory; he'd had no idea  _how_ he loved her; as a friend? A sister? A lover? It was only once he saw her face and held her against him that he realised he didn't have a label for how he felt. He loved her and so long as he got to spend the rest of his days in the glow of her, he didn't care about anything other than that. 

 

For her part, Jemma had spent so long worrying about going home after the war, and so she had tried to stray further away for even longer, but it occurred to her one morning that coming to the recovery centre had brought her home after all.

***

He was probably imagining it, but physical therapy seemed easier when he had Jemma there to help him out when he was struggling, to encourage him when he didn’t feel like trying. And, it was probably just him, but even knowing she was close seemed to help him sleep more easily, he seemed to wake, startled and afraid, caught up in a tangle of sheets, much less often now. 

And, of course, she’d shared every important moment of his life with her since he was a child, so suddenly, memory loss didn’t seem like such a terrifying, looming shadow after all. She helped him remember without ever giving too much away, celebrated his personal triumphs with him, shared in his sadness as he finally recalled losing his father, and watching his mother grow ill.  

*** 

He told her he loved her the first day he successfully walked properly, unaided. When he’d done the short route up and down one of the building’s corridors, and returned to her where she waited at his starting point, he’d thrown his arms round her, exhilarated with a feeling of deep accomplishment. He hadn’t meant the words to come out as he held onto her tightly, but they had, and for a second he thought his heart had stopped. He’d never truly been sure about the nature of Jemma’s feelings towards him, while his for her had never been in doubt.

She’d merely ghosted her lips against his cheek, and whispered his name gently against his skin.

“ _Fitz_. I’ve _always_ loved you.”

Perhaps the only moment to rival the feeling of hearing her say those words, when was he and Trip were surprised by a visit from a woman Fitz could only assume was Skye. She burst into their ward far too enthusiastically, greeting them far too loudly and smiled so wide it brought a grin to his own face. She’d laughed at his accent within two minutes of speaking to him and he’d responded with a sly comment about her first morning at the field hospital. He could tell they were going to get along.

May was in tow, too, with her quiet, calming presence and wearing the first real, genuine smile he’d seen on her face. They’d requested time to visit the centre before they started the long journey home and they spent the day there, Jemma joining them when her shift was over. (Fitz had never known pride like watching Jemma in her element, treating patients and taking charge when necessary). 

They all huddled together that day, the little group of five, laughing and sharing stories of the war, and of home. It had warmed Fitz to see the way Trip and Skye snuck little glances at each other, and it had taken him far too long to realise that he and Jemma had spent all afternoon doing the very same.

***

His lips found hers, almost of their own accord, as, on the 11th of November, they cheered and celebrated the news of an armistice along with everyone else. She'd been shocked at first, taken aback by it all. She realised quickly enough that it was what she wanted, however, and if kissing him back so enthusiastically, and for quite so long, was improper, the war had taken away any consideration she'd ever had about propriety. 

Of course, Jemma refused to let Fitz travel home until she thought he was strong and mobile enough to be discharged, so it was nearing the end of November when they finally left. Trip was one of the few left in the hospital; it had finally been safe to transport any English patients, en masse, to the ports around the country, and with France liberated, most of the Frenchmen had been sent to homes in their own towns and cities. He'd embraced them warmly in turn as they left, his arm much stronger than when he'd first arrived, promising he'd write to them, and telling them to take care. They both had to fight back a few tears as they'd turned their backs on him, but they were certain they weren't parting forever. 

By the time they both, _finally,_  walked across the docks at Boulogne-sur-Mer again, this time together, he had grown so used to the sensation of holding her hand in his, he never wanted to let go again.

And perhaps the best part was that he didn’t have to.

The road had be long up until now, and it would continue to be just the same; arduous and uneven, twisting and bending in ways that neither of them could fully imagine. But they didn’t have to walk it alone anymore, and that made all the difference.


	10. Epilogue: I’ve Seen That Road Before

_20 th December, 1919  
_ _Shepherds Bush, London_

“Fitz, look at this!” she called brightly down to him, making her way slowly down the garden path and into the little wooden shed they’d first earmarked as their workspace the moment they'd moved into the house together.

“How can I look when you’re all the way out there?” he shouted back and she rolled her eyes, grateful to duck into the relative shelter of the workshop and out of the howling, icy wind.

“It’s too dark to see properly in here,” she murmured, turning up one the lanterns.

“I can see just fine, don’t fuss,” he quipped back distractedly, and she walked up behind him, keen to see which design he was working on. Fitz had always been beautiful in work, and he was no different now, biting his lip and staring intently at the diagram in front of him. Carding an affectionate hand through his hair, she waited until he reached a natural stopping point in his work and eventually, he turned around, smiling up at her.

Glad to have his full attention, she handed over the envelope they’d just received, in amongst the morning post delivery. It was stuffed, full to bursting, with large quantities of paper – in fact, the letter inside was so long Jemma had actually wondered if her university thesis had been shorter.

 

Exactly on her wavelength, Fitz murmured, "Christ, wasn't your thesis as long as this?" as he took the envelope from her. 

He quickly skimmed the first page, reading for context and grinning broadly when he found it. Flipping through the pages more quickly, he found the tiny photograph attached at the back, a grainy, almost-distorted image, but a pleasant one nonetheless. Set in a simple outdoors backdrop, the smiling faces of Skye and Trip beamed out at them, Skye waving happily at the lens, Trip’s arm flung comfortably over her shoulders. It was stuck to a piece of paper, across which, Skye had simply scrawled the words ‘ _Seasons’ Greetings!_ ’ and she and Trip had both doodled pictures of holly, gifts, and candles on the paper.

“I’ll let you read it for yourself, but they’ve not really settled down, just as we guessed. Apparently at the moment they’re in Cincinnati, but they’re hoping to have the train fare back to Chicago for a little while at the start of the New Year.”

It was clear that both Trip and Skye cared about as much for propriety as Jemma had by the end of the war. The experiences they'd shared had a funny way of doing that to people, she couldn’t imagine a better existence for her friends than one that involved just the two of them, any means of transport they could find, and a life spent hopping from place to place, working when it was necessary, relaxing when it suited.

Besides, with the way the law worked against them, Skye had told them she doubted that they'd ever be able to get married in the eyes of the law anyway, so would always earn the disapproval of some people. 

 _'It's just lucky we don't care!"_ she'd written at one point, and Jemma could practically hear the two of them laughing.  

“They seem to think they might  _try_ and get married, and they said that we'd be welcome to visit for it, or for a little mock ceremony, for Trip's mother's benefit, if not," she told Fitz, too happy to spare all of the details for him. "I should think we could probably send out a few more designs, tighten our belts a little. The fare to America won’t be _that_ much,” she said hopefully, a certain note to her voice that she knew he probably wouldn't refuse. 

To his credit, he did try to stare her down for a moment. Fitz rarely won in their battles of wills though, simply because he did not really care to. He wanted to go to America too, Jemma knew, just needed the push a little more.

“I guess we’ll see after Christmas,” he told her, rising and slipping his arms around her waist, propping his chin up on her shoulder. “And I suppose we’ll have to see what the university says too.”

It had taken a long while for them to successfully push themselves back into a routine of study, but ultimately, working together on scientific designs and experiments was the thing that came most naturally to them. Plus, their professors had been nothing but accommodating and understanding as they continued with their work, helping them transition from students to, as they finished their theses and were awarded their qualifications, full-time researchers at the university.

“Well, I’m sure they won’t mind. We never technically took a honeymoon," she pointed out, biting back a laugh at the very idea of them doing so. 

Fitz snorted at that, and Jemma understood. They were not ‘honeymoon’ type of people. Heck, they weren’t even really marriage type of people. But after the events at the hospital, a wedding had followed organically, their families more the driving force in organising the ceremony, even if they both knew, without ever really discussing it, that they'd be spending the rest of the lives together; sharing everything and working together, just as they had before the war.

In fact, Jemma was shocked at how easily she’d warmed to the idea of marrying Fitz; she’d always thought she’d have been content never to marry at all. But, deep down, she knew, it would have to be Fitz, only ever Fitz. There was no one else she’d even want to consider any kind of a romantic relationship with. And even if it was difficult to get her head around it all sometimes, she was happy. They both were. After all, they’d loved each other for years, nothing in their relationship had changed, only their living arrangements, and the simple, unobtrusive golden bands social custom dictated they now had to wear.

“What’s this letter?” he asked, plucking another envelope from the pocket of her coat. She’d put it there before making her way through the garden to see him, equally puzzled by its nondescript appearance.  

“I don’t know,” she replied, brow furrowing slightly. “It’s addressed to both of us, but it’s not a hand I recognise.”

She couldn’t pinpoint it, but something about the letter was strange. Fitz, ever more impatient than her, took ripped it open, pulling out the letter within. 

“Hey look! It’s a note from May!” he exclaimed, detatching a small square of paper clipped to the front page of a more official-looking piece of paper. He read it to himself, before passing it on to her.  

_Personally recommended you both for consideration for the organisation. It’s secret, so don’t tell anyone not even family members. All the other information you need is inside. Please consider it fully – we could use people like you. Hope you two are keeping well, thinking of you oft3BKNEkrdGdFZlBGWGgzOUd1eTZLMGVnPCp>At the bottom, there was a postscript, highlighted for Jemma's attention._

_P.S. Jemma, it seems like you might not be the only to have had a friend come back from the dead. I’m happy we could both enjoy some good news for once._

_May._

She wondered what that could mean, before Fitz unknowingly provided the answer for her.

“The letter’s from a guy called Phillip Coulson," Jemma's heart did a little twist in her chest, and she hoped that this was the 'Phil' May had once mentioned to her. "He’s interested in our work, and is writing on behalf of something called the ‘Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate’ apparently." 

At this, Fitz paused, catching her gaze, a little twinkle in his eye. "Come on, surely you have to be thinking what I’m thinking?”

She nodded, smiling, and when they spoke, it was in unison, as ever,  

“They’re really going to have to come up with better name for that.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. Okay. The end. I can't believe it if I'm honest. 
> 
> This round of AoS Big Bang was set for stories of 10k or more, and while I always over-write and expected to do more than 10, I never expected to get so lost in this that it ended up as over 30k. As a result, at it's worst, this almost never happened since I nearly dropped out a few times, so with that in mind, time for a few thank yous. Firstly, thank you to literally everyone who acted as cheerleader, even right at the start, including [leopoldfitz](http://leopoldfitz.tumblr.com/), [remuslovestonks](http://remuslovestonks.tumblr.com/), and [maximofff](http://maximofff.tumblr.com/). Huuuge thank yous too, to [anankas](http://anankas.tumblr.com/) and [rlupin](http://rlupin.tumblr.com/), for being the biggest cheerleaders and for beta-reading parts of this when they almost certainly had better things to be doing. You guys are all such great friends, so thanks! 
> 
> Thanks as well to [caputell](http://caputell.tumblr.com/), for choosing my fic and for her amazing art. And thanks for being such a fun person to work with, getting to know you is another thing which has made the AoS Big Bang experience worthwhile! 
> 
> And yeah, thank you if you got through all of this! I hope to hear what you have to think below, if you have time to leave a comment or two!!
> 
> Finally, a quick note on historical accuracy: I'm a History student, so I naturally have a funny relationship with historical accuracy. On the one hand, I'm a stickler for it, on the other, years of classes on how to present and interact with history for those people outside of the academy have left me understanding that it's not all things to all people. I took a class on cultural/social changes and life in the trenches during/after WWI so much of the stuff here was taken from that. Neurasthenia is the real name used for shell shock at the time, and it was poorly understood. The paper I mentioned exists, and medicine and oxygen therapy in WWI is fascinating. Laws regarding inter-racial marriage in America at the time were in place. However, at the end of the day, I write fic to escape stuff like University, so I didn't take myself too seriously. I've gone all out on historical accuracy for pieces before but this didn't feel like the time or the place. Feel free to bring up niggles in the comments, but know that I'll probably be just as aware of slips in accuracy as you are!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Agents of SHIELD WWI AU FitzSimmons](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2564255) by [caputell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caputell/pseuds/caputell)




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